Epiphany and Love

I love this picture that I used in my 2nd post. It really does look like an epiphany to me.

I don't believe we have used the word "Love" once this semester or at least we haven't examined it's connection to epiphanies. To my knowledge, the rest of the texts will not cause this word to surface. Something critical is missing from the syllabus so, Dr. Sexson, please fit this into the class. What we have examined thus far in epiphanies suggests that they are somehow stronger or perhaps removed from love. I think we simply have not yet connected these dots because we do not yet understand the space between them.

Love is the essence of an epiphany. In this context, both are the awareness of deeper understanding of ones own presence in the world and the connection(s) which exist within it. Both are entirely irrational, incalculable, and with effects often completely beyond our control. In reflection, they both represent equally powerful markers for events on the road maps of our lives. I don't even think these two things are parallels. They seem to me to be tied to something deeper, something more primal, within our biology.

What is (mostly) unique to humans and has allowed us to evolve to where we are? Speciesism aside, our ability to discern possibility out of experience ultimately manifests in the expression of art. (don't worry, this isn't a tangent) As our awareness allows us to examine our experiences and improve upon our reality, so too our awareness allows us to create and appreciate art which, in essence, is still rooted in our awareness. This is a very important (and convoluted) point. To the Lighthouse, Annie Dillard's essays, and the various poems we've read, they ALL represent art which in some manner attempts to describe epiphanies or relate epiphanic experiences. They make good commentary and good discussion material but where are they truly sourced? (The answer is of course "Mythology" but that's besides the point and an entirely different class, even though we've all taken that class before and we just need to remember it, and it is any class we've ever taken with Dr. Mytholo-ah-I-mean-Sexson)

At work the other week, I had a small epiphany. I take the containers off of a rack and then put them in a box. Then I do it again and again and again. And again. Arranging the boxes after filling them is tedious. It involves a great deal of carrying. Here's what I figured out. Rather than fill the boxes and move them each one at a time, I figured out a way to fill one box, place another on top, then fill that one, then place a final box on top (creating a stack) and fill it. Lifting all three boxes at once and reducing the frequency of my lifting is far easier than lifting each box individually. That's what leg muscles are for.
See the difference? It made a very significant improvement to my work day and it occurred through observational awareness. Here is my important point.

Humans are SUPPOSED to be able to do this! We make these small leaps all the time. Some animals have teeth, other animals have wings, still other animals are incredibly fast. As an animal, we are observationally aware and that is our special trait. We figure out a more nifty way to avoid traffic while driving during rush hour, a different way to carry things, and a new way to put a handle on to basically any concept for a tool. This ability to process an abstract concept and apply an improvement to our lives is our greatest strength. WE ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE EPIPHANIES AND WE ARE SUPPOSED TO PROCESS THEM TO THE BETTERMENT OF OUR LIVES!

It's possible I could have separated love and this idea behind the evolutionary source of our epiphanies into two separate posts but they seem connected to me. Here's what I see.

Love, or how it frequently occurs in our many societies as "partnership", is found all over the world in almost every form of life. There are plenty of people who disagree with this and it's a hell of a lot easier to justify most of our stupid, elitist, speciesist crap if we ignore the reality that love fills the world all around us. If you happen to be one of those wrong people who believes in this wrong speciesist crap which is wrong, then suspend your disbelief for a moment while I make this connection.

Love is a biological imperative for us exactly like observational awareness. By experiencing an intense emotional connection to a person, place, thing or idea, we are far more capable of propagating that thing (or simply propagating). We are supposed to experience love! Unfortunately, it is not always convenient. Though separate entities from a philosophical viewpoint, they are manifestations of the same thing. I don't think I can explain this so I'll simply move on to the visual argument for this.



Mr. Darcy experiences a dark epiphany ("What!? She won't marry me? She thinks I'm an A-hole?!") and Elizabeth experiences an epiphany as well ("OMG I hate this guy so much I turned down marriage and an insane amount of money which could've floated my family for the rest of their lives!!), though Elizabeth's epiphany is more of an after effect of this scene.

I think this scene, and the entire book (Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin) represent love as one form of an epiphany according to our understanding of epiphanies. When love comes upon us, we experience it as we would experience any other epiphany; it can be immediate or gradual but it always leaves something about us permanently changed through the awareness we are granted. When I read this book, I see the love and the epiphanies are the same thing. Love, just as a standard epiphany (maybe that phrase is an oxymoron), is rooted in our observational awareness in the world around us. Occasionally, we make great leaps and bounds. Love, and epiphanies, do not simply appear out of the ether. We see the same effects and this convinces me they occur from the same source in our evolutionary biology.

I can feel myself descending into obfuscated and potentially (more) belligerent writing. I'll wrap it up and go watch Lost. Maybe I'll respond to this at some point during spring break.

Mything in the Lighthouse

Dr. Sexson said we could find a mythical interpretation of basically anything the book. So I've randomly selected a page, front and back, to read with a mythical interpretation. How can someone truly select a random page from a book without using random.org? I have selected the 1 page which has come loose in my copy. It must have been read heavily before it found itself in my possession because I certainly didn't put this millage on the book. So, this is as random as it gets. Here we go.

My selection begins several paragraphs into section 11 of The Lighthouse near the end of the book. This section begins with an observation about how much depends upon the ocean and then also upon distance. Now that's not on my page so I won't begin discussing Posidan and a line from the Homeric hymns at length (although that might come once I actually get to my selection).

One line in! "...she supposed, looking at the thouse, but nothing appeared there. But then, she remembered"! Nothing appears when we look for it but, once we remember, there it is! This reminds me of the mantra we keep hearing about how we already know everything we need to know and all we need to do is remember it. Those pesky Greek philosophers do better arguing the merits of vegetarianism.

Distance. Silence. Movement. These are the key words for both sides of my page which emphasis a perfect state of awareness, a "feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten eyars ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be in love with the place." This is as Lily is watching everyone else head to the lighthouse. In their absence, Lily experiences that quiet moment of total awareness of oneself which all of us know about. How does all of this relate to myth?

These all remind me of Odysseus and the sirens. Odysseus must pass by the sirens but he knows if he and his men hear their song they will all be lost. He orders his men to plug their ears with wax to remain immune to the siren's call. However, Odysseus wants to hear the sirens so he tells his men to chain him to the mast of the ship.I suppose this relates to Lily in that her "feeling of completeness" is followed by the length of almost five sentences (even though it's only two, can we say fragment happy?) shows her sense of love to be equal to Odysseus' sense of determination which is heroic and legendary. What Odysseus experiences with the sirens is beyond accurate description as is Lily's perception of love ("Love had a thousand shapes").

To The Lighthouse

To The Lighthouse makes me feel (sea)sick...
Third read and I'm still not impressed. To me, it feels like someone turned 90210 into a book and inserted some literary thought. Regardless of the level or value of the literary thought, it's still 90210. "In this chapter David learns drugs are bad, Brenda and Dillon have trouble, and Donna makes a new friend!" So I still don't like it.

Boats float on water, the great metaphor for change...
The imagery behind boats is worth examining. The lighthouse, while obviously the metaphor for awakening (made blindingly clear between the end of the 2nd section and the title for the third section), is the destination, the subject or noun, the goal. The ships are a the vehicle to get to the destination, the verb or action, the means. There was a terrific quote somewhere in the middle of the book about the growth of trees and then ships are mentioned shortly after. Trees are semi-ladders for the metaphor of ascension. The branches act as rungs and the connection with nature/growth often exceeds that of an actual ladder. In this quote (I don't have a page number), there is a specific reference to trees and then shortly after follows the ships. Trees... ships. The ships come from the trees. The ships give people the agency needed to reach the lighthouse.

Something we've already studied in other works...
There was another good quote (I don't have a page number for this one either) near the end of the book. It talks about people hurrying up with their reading so they can finish. This bookends nicely with a quote from p43, "Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them." There are other sandwichings in the beginning and ending of the book. Most notable of these are the aggressive murderous thoughts held by men. I think the murderous rage moments represent passion and hate. I think the book references represent consideration and imagination. These are each qualities found in any given family/relationship so I think they were inserted overtly into the beginning and ending of the book as markers signifying that things exist in between. This is a different approach towards drawing dots and helping us make connections than the other authors we have studied have taken.

Summary
I'm sure everyone in this class has watched or been exposed to a movie which is a complete and total waste of time. You know that feeling of "I want those 2 hours of my life back"? That's what I feel with this book. I can't be finished with it soon enough.

Reflections
I think I may be unnecessarily critical about some of these books and I feel I better understand why that is. First, I know what I'm interested in and these texts aren't it. Second, I'm getting progressively more and more crunched for time. A weekend spent rereading Lighthouse is a weekend I could've spent with my project. Third, drawing connections between these different texts seems uncommonly difficult. Yeah, they're all supposed to be related to epiphanies but I don't feel they cover the damn things as clearly as they could. I don't feel like I'm getting as much out of these texts about epiphanies as I feel I should be getting out of them. Finally, I feel like none of these texts have addressed epiphanies as I would have them do it (but that's a whole different post in itself). I'll have a decent post on epiphanies for you sometime tomorrow evening.

Indiana Jones, Moab, and Tintern/Edward Abbey

I have a starting point for my discussion on Tintern Abbey other than the actual text. Does anyone remember that T.V. series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles? At the end of the first season, Sean Patrick Flanery falls in love with a young Elizabeth Hurley. There's a scene in the the last episode of the season which details a portion of how they fall in love. I think it's fantastic and I hope all 3 people who read my blog watch it. The scene starts just before the 5 minute mark but the linguistic battle begins after the 6 minute mark after Sylvia Pankhurst leaves the table.



This exchange of language is one of the most memorable moments of television for me. It's right up there with the first time I watched Highlander The Series. This representation of linguistic dexterity is brought out of their childhood memories of world travel and it is made beautiful with a nice mixture of competitive human nature and physical beauty (Elizabeth Hurley). This attraction based upon similar memories of foundational experience is a terrific lead in to this next video selection. Young Indy and Young Elizabeth head off to the country and part of their time is spent wandering around Tintern Abbey! Starts just after 3 minutes.



Tintern Abbey is Eliot's old stone that cannot be deciphered yet it absorbs light and creates a new building in the form of it's ruins. Tintern Abbey is Dillard's stone which talks and doesn't need a hermit to teach it anything (in the poem Wordsworth's hermit sits by a fire and that's it). Tintern Abbey is a mix between Stonehenge, the Sistine Chapel, and a marriage bed on wedding night. When we see the image, even without knowing any of it's history, we connect it with love, the memory of love and all else love can mean.

Now this is something everyone interprets in Wordsworth's poem on their own. Is the religious expression contained in the poem (in great quantity) a manifestation of the awesome presence of nature/love or is the amazing natural world/existence of love created to fit the religious expression? I lean on the side of nature/love creating a religious interpretation. Three different times he mentions the body of the man and afterwords the spirit, indicating that the spirit follows the body and not the other way around. Near the end, "Nature" comes before "holier love".

Tintern Abbey once acted as an incidental religious building in which monks made a beer of only local renown (if I recall correctly). Without changing into the ruins of today, the building would never have reached it's true potential. This leads me to think change is a necessary ingredient for ascension into the sublime state. We are the ones who must change and recognize the change. The first time Wordsworth went there, he didn't compose the poem. It took revisiting it for him to write this poem.

What else could be a parallel with Tintern Abbey? That's easy. Go to the town of Moab in Utah and visit Canyonlands National Park and Arches National Park. It's only 10 hours away. Every time I return, I feel a magnetic pull to the land around me stronger than I recall from my previous visit. I'm not religious and I doubt I ever will be yet a place like this has me nearly convinced that god could actually exist. The land itself breaths an expression of love and I become more and more addicted to the constant inhalation of it during my visits. I imagine it's a good deal more powerful than Tintern Abbey and until you've seen it with your own eyes you will not know what it is I speak of.

Now it's too late to go and find visual media to link these two together so I'll leave you with only words. If you've ever watched the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the best movie of the series), then you've seen some of Moab. They shot the opening scene leading up to and outside of the "caves" in Arches National Park. The whole opening for the movie is a reminiscing as Indy chases after an artifact he's searched for his entire life, beginning with his childhood. Memory. Change over time. The stone (or Indy's sought after treasure) indecipherable and yet by absorbing light it speaks to us deep in our souls. It's all right there.

Go to Moab. And don't bring Tintern Abbey with you. Instead, bring Edward Abbey.

Expeditions and Encounters

Caution! Long post but should be entertaining once you get through the literary criticisms. Really, lit crit?
Who wants to read that?


Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk ranks about average on my reading list and somewhat below average overall on my bookshelf. Guess what! It turns out I already had a copy. I guess the book and the author aren't memorable enough for me when I'm in the bookstore looking over semester textbooks. Even though we're only supposed to blog about "Total Eclipse", there are other writings in the book I'd like to comment upon first.

Dillard gains some ground with me for drawing highly accurate parallels between the danger, degradation and frequent lunacy found in christianity in America today and the ridiculous, folly riddled history of arctic exploration in "An Expedition to the Pole". The way she compares these two things makes several key points. First, if there already exists a better way to do something, don't show up with a different idea thinking your way is going to be superior. Hubris kills people once it exposes them, in this case to the elements. The first British explorers in the arctic focused on bringing fine silver and an expanded library rather than provisions to survive the weather. We see this same sort of logic frequently applied within upstart "christian" churches in America. The lesson here, although Dillard doesn't say it clearly, is if you strip away the institution, something worthwhile should be left behind. Interestingly, she becomes roman catholic 6 years after this essay is published! The second point which I see Dillard making somewhat more clearly is religion is the act of searching for a goal but we are human, mortal, weak and often stupid. In this dangerous land of uncovered and sensitive humanity, ideally, religion becomes a technology to strengthen us and our search. That's what I get out of her titles "The Land", The People" and "The Technology" within the writing. Other great points are well made and I think this essay is her strongest one in the book, even more so than "Total Eclipse". The subject isn't about an epiphanic experience though so I can understand why we would skip over it.

Another essay worth mentioning is Teaching a Stone to Talk. It isn't a terrific essay for what it says directly but for what it infers, the "space between the dots", or how she indirectly covers her points in a very direct manner. Now that last one there, THAT is interesting. "The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega." She so directly covers what she's talking about but indirectly references exactly what points she makes. She argues we exist to witness however our ability to witness is entirely irrelevant for the act of creation. We are not a necessary ingredient in the wonderful thing which is life. And, when we reach this realization, only then do we gain the awareness that all the noise in our brain amounts to nothing as it represents only our own mental/social/species clutter. All that is, all that exists, is the silence, the beginning and the end. The snowflake is silent and we are not. Think about it.

All of this is erased in my mind when she writes fucked up material about prolonging the death of an animal in an effort to have more tender meat (google it yourself or read here about it's a MYTH <- great link, covers a whole lot of other stuff too). Literary criticisms do not even excuse this (at least none that I've read and I've read about this) as it's akin to snuff literature. It serves no great literary purpose other than to piss me off and highlight who else misses the point. So she won the pulitzer prize. I hope future "elite" authors can better represent the sensitive side of humanity which recognizes the moral limits between what is right and what is wrong. This line exists cross culturally and I can see it as clearly as a first down marker for football. How is it that this simple thing is missed by so many people? Isn't it obvious? In one very important paragraph, she almost excuses herself. She writes

We lay in the tent and talked. "If it had been my wife," one man said with special vigor, amazed, "she wouldn't have cared what was going on: she would have dropped everything right at that moment and gone in the village from here to there to there, she would not have stopped until that animal was out of its suffering one way or another. She couldn't bear to see a creature in agony like that."
I nodded.

She agrees even though SHE DID NOTHING!!! She sees the face of suffering and knowingly continues to participate in it. She says she's thought about "carniverousness" and that suffering for her diet is not an "issue". She tries to express condolences, sympathy.. something, and then discounts it completely. "I knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say." That is the most disturbing part of this writing to me. This shadow of morality is not a bad thing. When you embrace it, it becomes the most wonderful thing you've ever experience, stronger than a literary epiphany, traditional thoughts on love, or even the power of religion to sway the masses. She watches the animal suffering and does and says nothing. She doesn't even condemn herself for doing nothing. Instead, she excuses herself. If at any point she's commenting on her own weakness, she refuses to acknowledge it and totally missed it. That makes this essay exist basically without a point. She's told us one of her experiences but there is no "moral" to the story (at least not one she's willing to face). In essence, she's told us not to feel bad about the deer and I take issue with that.

I'll spell it out for everyone in case anyone else also can't see the yellow line as clearly as I can.

• Eating animals and animal foods is an acceptable human practice
• Causing unnecessary suffering to animals, under every circumstance, including for the purposes of eating them and the things which come from them, is an unacceptable practice
• Apathy concerning this directly supports unnecessary suffering and is an unacceptable human practice.

Now that we have no confusion, I'd like to say that it is not necessary to eat her way. I traveled to Costa Rica and should probably write about it as a contrast to her travel writings. At the end of the pavement, the road continued. It went on unpaved for several hours, gradually getting more and more rocky. Eventually, we passed the point of other vehicles. The locals only had horses and bicycles. Further on down this road, it finally ends at a dock. At the end of the dock was a boat. A 45 minute boat ride took us a good 20 miles into a national park inaccessible by land. Beyond the park was a tiny little town on a tiny little island amidst the swampy marshy waterways. This town had a dirt packed main street and the few buildings alongside it were built with scrap materials hauled enormous distances at great cost to the people who used them. At the end of the dirt packed main street was a building. I went into the building and, as the few member of my group still with me dispersed to do other things, I entered the kitchen/dining room of one of the oldest people I've ever met. I don't speak Spanish but I made myself understood through what I believe was her grandson (or maybe great grandson) that I was vegan. She seemed confused upon hearing about my being vegan until it clicked. Her eyes lit up, she stared at me as if looking into my soul, reached forward and kissed me on my forehead. Then she busied her self in the kitchen for 30 minutes and served me one of the most amazing meals I have ever eaten.

Food is one of the most regularly occurring epiphanies which we can experience. I think it is exceeded only by taming a feral cat and turning the feral cat into a lap cat (which is an end product to embracing that shadow of morality I mentioned above). Experiencing the daily love and affection of a formerly feral cat even beats food. But back to food. Food is how enemies sit down at a table and become friends. Food is how we seal a wedding, with the feast afterwords. Food is something we use to create the rituals in our lives which affect us on the deepest levels (think of Dr. Sexson popping out of a mask at the end of a sacred ritual and revealing an ear of corn shouting "all is now revealed!") Gravity holds our universe the way it is. Food holds our lives in the same all powerful grasp. Without it, we will not survive. In the last 50-60 years or so, humans have lost more knowledge when it comes to food than in any other time in recorded history. For Annie Dillard to bring up food when she clearly knows nothing about its deep and awesome power either personally or literarily, reminds me of a whiny teen who has not yet learned what it is they speak of.

Commentary on Total Eclipse.

The woman is addicted to eggs (which are probably from a factory farm in which the chickens live perpetually in an eclipse which so frightens Dillard. Ironic?)

One particular line did stand out to me as something important which would probably not be covered in class or in the blogs (and if brought up, would be buried under an avalanche of other stuff like in this blog post). "It was as useless as a memory; it was as off kilter and hollow and wretched as a memory." I think this is in reference to the useless memory of the hotel lobby with the aging hooker/waitress (unclear) and television absorbed older men. The clowns are useless too. One nice thing about Dillard is that the extraneous stuff she writes, the filler, the text garbage, she will point to it and call it what it is: a tangent from the point.

This is an important point. I see Dillard's writing as more about taking us too something than simply the snapshot memory. Movement becomes a necessary element to the points she raises with her writing. The snap shot memories have no movement and pale in comparison to the memories with movement. They drive to the location. They move up the hill. The experience of the eclipse moves upon them and then moves past them at 1,800 miles an hour. To process the event, she and her husband change locations, by car, and then discuss it at the diner. The very process of the eclipse itself requires movement. So I think we should take a closer look at how Dillard uses movement and how relates movement moving her.

If you read this far I commend you. As a side note, check out this story of a former student of Annie Dillard. Something I've learned about one difference between a good teacher and a great teacher, a good teacher shows no faults and no cracks. A great teacher has visible chinks in their armor. This is necessary for us students to over come the challenge of their aura, or presence, and then be strong enough to square off against ourselves and the walls we naturally present ourselves.

"Fisher King" and Hopkins

The Fisher King is a movie about "a radio DJ, suicidally despondent because of a horrible mistake he made, finds redemption in helping a deranged homeless man who was a victim of it." (copied directly from the link) This seems not quite coincidental with the actual wiki entry for "Fisher King". Perhaps the movie will prove interesting and be worth a blog entry. I anticipate some level of frustration as the file comes with hard coded french subs.

As for the Windhover...

I think I'm one of those people who is excessively critical about poetry. I don't like the Windhover. I don't see anything interesting in it. I do see a good deal of stuff IN it. However it doesn't hold my attention. I could bash it but that's not constructive.

I think it reads like a homoerotic love poem. Hopkins wiki confirms this. The first paragraph is the warm up. The next three lines are the finish. The last three lines are mushy/messy afterwords. Does that make this some fantastic lofty poem worth discussing in class? No. We had a whole bunch of dots handed to us in class but I don't see any uniting threads/themes which make it worth of it's alleged fame. So that doesn't help either.

Honestly, I'd call this over represented love poetry. I have read better poems in Greg Keelers creative writing class. Maybe I haven't read Windhovers enough to "get it" yet but I can tell you I'm probably never going to read it again. The only bright point is coming across a link in Hopkins wiki entry for Wasteland in relationship to mythology. It might prove useful for my project as a focus point if I use any hero imagery.