tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-366580902024-03-05T00:11:48.985-05:00Brigid's BlogThe blog of choice for the distracted dilettante.Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.comBlogger459125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-83377252687733811762016-10-01T10:04:00.002-04:002016-10-01T10:09:44.006-04:00Head Full of Ghosts (Paul Tremblay)I start too many blog posts with the phrase "it's been a long time," but the fact remains that I haven't blogged in a long time. In another month I will be officially finished with my doctorate, so perhaps I can get back to some more posting, and more book reviews in between academic papers, the novel I'm trying to publish, my day job, and my part-time job teaching 70 students and grading their papers. It will be a question of time management and energy. <br></br>
I did manage to take some time to read Paul Tremblay's recent novel <a href="http://amzn.to/2dHI1uE">"Head Full of Ghosts."</a> I haven't read Tremblay's previous novels, but this one came with two very separate and enthusiastic recommendations from a couple of Facebook friends; I know one of them from high school and met the other during John Foxx's tour in 2011. The synopsis of the book promised a psychological thriller written from different points of view, and I find this immediately intriguing. I love well-crafted psychological horror. <br></br>
"Head Full of Ghosts" promised something involved and complex that left you uncertain about the reality of events, and it did not disappoint in any way. The story is told from the perspective of Meredith Barrett, know as "Merry." The story is about her family--her parents, John and Sarah, and her sister Marjorie. When Marjorie starts to exhibit strange psychological symptoms, she is first taken to a psychiatrist, but then her unemployed father, who has "found religion," asks a Catholic priest called Father Weatherly for advice, and we are then led to believe that Marjorie is possessed by a demon. The family is in desperate financial straits, and when they end up being approached about doing a reality TV show about Marjorie's "possession," they agree to do it. John wants us to believe that his motivation is to make Marjorie better; Sarah admits that she mainly agreed to it because of the money involved, though she wants to believe it will help. She does not believe her daughter is possessed. There is a twist ending that I won't reveal here--you only get hints throughout the novel that Merry is somehow the only one who has survived the reality TV ordeal. <br></br>
I am teaching Mythology again this semester, and one of the points I stressed in my opening lectures was the importance of narrative, and the ways in which we run on a script, never aware of our own stories. Our only contact with the rich world of the collective unconscious is through dreams, fantasies, and crises--including psychological breakdowns or psychoses. The stories we are drawn to tell us something about our unconscious state. In the first part of Tremblay's novel, Marjorie tells stories to Merry. Marjorie writes and draws in Merry's Richard Scarry book, with its town of animals, even though Merry is too old for Richard Scarry at the age of eight. Merry likes the stories, because they always have happy endings. But then Marjorie begins to tell darker stories, and if you read a lot of Jung, you realize immediately that she is slipping into a kind of schizoid state. The first story is about a flood of molasses that leaves everyone in the town "stuck"; the second is about vines that grow up through the basement and take over the house. Primal consciousness is devouring the personality, and leaving Marjorie "stuck." Merry runs into Marjorie in the basement early in the filming process of the show. Marjorie confides in her that she is not demon-possessed, that she's just playing along. But then she says (and I'm paraphrasing) "I'm not possessed by a demon. I'm possessed by ideas." These are the voices she hears in her head. And I thought, BINGO. Beautifully written, and dead-on accurate. This is not a demon, this is being taken over by "elementary ideas"--the archetypes. There is something Dionysian about her dream of vines. <br></br>
As the novel progresses, the reader is left uncertain about whether or not Marjorie really IS possessed, though the decided tone of Merry's narrative makes you skeptical of the whole operation. There is definitely a sexist element to the whole thing, as Marjorie "could not possibly" know certain things as a fourteen-year-old girl, things that she certainly could know if she applied herself. When they give their litany of evidence, Sarah tells them that of course Marjorie knows those things--she's smart, and she reads. There is a hat-tip to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper," which is explicitly mentioned in some places. The attempts of the men in the story to reign in Marjorie's intellect and strength just leads to more disaster. <br></br>
By the end of the novel, the reader is questioning the sanity of all the characters--the parents, certainly, but also Merry. When I finished the book, I had some clues early on that she also might not be "quite right," and that the trauma she suffered with her family made an existing problem worse. I'll refrain from saying any more about the outcome; I encourage you to read the book yourself.<br></br>
The style of the book reminds me of Danielewski's "House of Leaves", though not as chaotic. The narrative is told through interview with Merry, Merry's first person recollections, and Merry's horror movie blog which she writes under a pseudonym. The pieces of the narrative are fed slowly to the reader, as you jump from one perspective of the situation to another, and it's very well-crafted.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-89147710251888177642016-03-04T10:23:00.001-05:002016-03-04T10:52:13.262-05:00American Authoritarianism and the ShadowNote: I generally try to avoid getting too political in posts. But I'm really bothered by what I see in the current politics of our country, and the professor in me wants to use this as a moment of reflection--and perhaps instruction. <br></br>
I teach Classical Mythology from a Jungian perspective. Archetype theory isn’t fashionable with all branches of scholarship, but I have always found it the most useful way of organizing and understanding the symbolic language of myth. In my lectures on the underworld and on the trials of the hero, I always talk about the pseudo-archetype of the Shadow. The Shadow does not represent human evil; it represents those aspects of ourselves that are weaker or less understood. This can include “evil” inclinations; whatever you consciously present to the world, the opposite always has its potential in your psyche, in “shadow”. The key to dealing with the Shadow is confrontation—you have to take a good look at yourself and what you’re afraid of, ashamed of, horrified by, etc. Most of us don’t like to do this; it can be a real ego-downer, and the goal of Shadow work is not to make you depressed or afraid. It’s to make you aware that most of what you’re afraid of exists inside yourself. But again, it is not automatic human nature to do this; most of the time we see the Shadow through projection—it is as though we are in a hall of mirrors. What we see in others that we intensely like or dislike represents usually unconscious qualities in ourselves. It’s good to pay attention to those things, because they tell you a lot about you. We should also not diminish the influence of the Shadow; it can be much scarier than it sounds. The more you acknowledge it as part of you, the less influence it has over you. The more you believe the “devil” is not in you (especially if you think you’re “saved”), the more control the “devil” has over you. <br></br>
When I discuss the Shadow with my students, I get varied reactions. I have no idea whether most of them “get” it or not. Jungian psychology is difficult for the 18-22 year-old set, unless they’ve had a number of life crises already. Jung himself admits that his psychology is really meant for those “at the middle of life”, which he roughly estimates as age 35. But that doesn’t mean his ideas aren’t relevant to other groups. When I give examples of collective Shadow projection in history, I usually get blank stares; students are removed from the emotional impact of historical catastrophes like the Holocaust. One might “get it” on a superficial level, or translate it to the idea “look at yourself before you blame others”. But now we have a real life example, and we need to pay attention. This is not a drill. <br></br>
The current Presidential election campaigns have been nothing short of a circus, and most candidates have been acting like clowns. Ultimately, though, this is about the public and not specifically the candidates. There is collective astonishment that this campaign-turned-reality-show is tolerated by intelligent people. This is instructive as to the “Shadow” state of our society. I will point to Trump particularly because he has a segment of voters that demonstrate political extremes. Several articles have come out recently, <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism">with this one being the most comprehensive</a>, on the ability to predict Donald Trump’s wins by the authoritarianism of his supporters. This, more than any other factor, has been correlated with his success. But what does it mean to be “authoritarian”? There is a discomfort with change, and a need to control the environment to maintain the status quo by any means necessary. It’s important to note (as the article above does) that supporting Trump doesn’t automatically make someone authoritarian. But one can have an authoritarian response to fear of change. You can look at the appeal of vigilante or “crazy cop” justice movies (Diehard, Lethal Weapon, Deathwish, etc.) or watch heroes killing off zombies with chainsaws to see the emotional response of “blowing away the bad guys”. But as it’s been pointed out, this a really a kind of anti-heroism—the hero goes out to battle, and nothing redeeming has been brought back. You just have a lot of dead (or deader) people. This is Virgil’s subtext in the last books of the <i>Aeneid</i>; unlike the <i>Iliad</i>, you see young boys, barely considered adults, going out to fight and being killed in a senseless bloodbath. War is not glorified in the <i>Aeneid</i>; Virgil writes this at the beginning of the Roman Empire, when Augustus represented a re-established <i>Pax Romana</i> (Roman Peace) after years of brutal civil war. <br></br>
But even outside the context of war, the authoritarian tendency is one for gaining forceful control over an external event, and the central motivation is fear. Everyone has authoritarian traits, just as everyone has narcissistic traits. If you ask my co-workers, I can be very authoritarian when I feel my department is given the short end of the stick by those outside. When it comes to my own life, I can be very controlling. However, this doesn’t extend to others—everyone should be able to live the life they want, whether they agree with me or not. A couple of other examples—my father has a lot of traits that might be construted as authoritarian; he’s always been staunchly conservative Repbulican, and big on “blowing away the bad guys”. However, my father doesn’t like Trump at all, and when it comes down to it, he adapts to societal change fairly well—he is indifferent to things like gay marriage, for instance. By contrast my mother is someone who fears change, and yet that again applies only to herself and her family; when it comes to the outside world, she is quite liberal, even if she has a hard time accepting certain societal changes. So, while there may be “classic authoritarians”, the amount of authoritarianism displayed is directly related to one’s fear response to a threat. Completely non-authoritarian personalities can act in authoritarian ways. Like all other “Shadow” traits, this doesn’t make someone “evil” or even hateful. <br></br>
So, how does all this relate? What we are afraid of is, by Jungian definition, ‘“in Shadow”. There is no “one right way” to deal with the Shadow; it depends on your own environment, culture, challenges, strengths, and weaknesses. Nonetheless, if we are going to live in a society that is able to flow with change and give real equality to all its citizens, we have to look at it—you can’t blame others, and there are no simplistic solutions. There are individual Shadows, and a country can have a collective Shadow. As Jung noted, “the brighter the light, the darker the shadow”, so one needs to be suspicious of efforts to “protect” the citizenry from the “evils” of a particular group or country. Those who have taken my classes know how I feel about the so-called “battle between good and evil”. There will always be conflict, always people with radically differing views. We live in a society that, while not perfectly pleasing everyone, allows everyone to have their views without punishment or censorship, at least by the law. There will always be a dynamic where one ideology may gain mainstream preference over another. This has for thousands of years been known as “the wheel of life”. The best place for you to be is in the center, not disoriented by the ups and downs. This is more difficult for us that it seems. <br></br>
You can recognize the Shadow when you see scapegoating. If change makes you uncomfortable, if you feel a great threat from the outside, the natural thing to do is to put up a wall and blame an outside person, group, or ideology. But your fear of whatever it is—ISIS, gay marriage, atheists, the government—ultimately it’s not about any of those things. It’s about you. And that is what it means to confront the Shadow. What you are really afraid of is a loss of control and liberty to be and do what you want—and this is certainly credible. But it’s also a denial of how the world really is—there is always going to be suffering, conflict, and clashes. Most of the horrors we envision never happen. The question becomes—how to do we choose to deal with it? And does our choice help the problem, or only make it worse? And most importantly—how do we negotiate problems that are unsolvable? We may not be as lucky as Oresetes, who had Apollo and Athena rooting for him against the Furies when he was stuck in an impossible situation. Sometimes you have to negotiate things on a day to day basis. <br></br>
In addition, we live in an era of too much information, and most of it questionable or useless. We often just want everything to go away, but we can’t help being bombarded by images unless we stay away from the Internet and all media. It is not surprising that we live in a society where younger people don’t want to be bothered with social and political questions, or with furthering their education; they have been bombarded since childhood, and just want to escape from it. But it is a part of growing up; you can’t stay in childhood forever, you have to develop resiliency. Most importantly, you have to not be afraid of the world, and when you do feel fear, don’t become immobilized. It’s your life to live, and you should not let the collective Shadow frighten you into betraying yourself. Regardless of who you support in this election, or what your personal response is to external crises, remember—most of what you are afraid of is within yourself, and most of it is what “could happen” rather than what “is”. Reflect on that, and treat others with the decency you’d want for yourself from them. Aggressiveness and bullying are not signs of leadership; they are signs of fear, weakness, and an inability to face realities. We all long for simple solutions, but take a deep breath and realize that not everything is simple, and if you can master your own fears, the others will fall from significance. Remember also that the great thing about America is your freedom to be who you are and what you want, and this necessarily means living with difference. There is no need to silence or disenfranchise those who are different from you; we’re all humans after all. <br></br>
Lastly—go back and brush up on your world history. Our country is in panic mode in response to crises, some real, many imagined or invented by the media. There is much to be learned from what has happened in other places in the past. Expose yourself to viewpoints different from your own. Education is not a liability; it is power. And real discourse is important, not shouting down the opposition—if we can’t find common ground, we will be destroyed faster than a Florida community in a sinkhole. Demand this from your politicians, and don't be sucked in by cheap pandering. <br></br>
You might say, "What do I have to do with it? Focusing on myself doesn't change anything else." Actually, yes it does. Societies are made up of individuals like yourself; if we don't change individually, nothing changes collectively.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-43635687953399453062015-11-26T08:01:00.002-05:002015-11-26T08:09:08.629-05:00ThankfulNovember has been a strange month. The first part of the month was amazing; the second part has made me want to pack my bags and move to an undisclosed cave. Rarely do I vacillate between such extremes. For the last week, I could tell you about all the negatives: my father is ill, certain co-workers are managing to get under my skin, and the inability of some of my students to read, write, or think in the most basic fashion makes me want to bang my head into a wall. I'm not in England, and that's where I'd prefer to be, but I still have things to do here before I can really think about going there to stay. And don't get me started on the state of the world: between Da'esh, terrorist threats, Donald Trump, and general American xenophobia, it's really hard to find things to be thankful for today, which is Thanksgiving Day. If we realize the roots of Thanksgiving Day, that's not such great shakes either for the Native Americans. Really, it's a depressing lot. <br></br>
So, I woke up this morning and decided that I needed to make an effort to think about things I am thankful for. Here is the list:<br></br>
1. I can own a house and pay my own way as a single woman in this miserable economy; my graduate education has been worth something economically.<br></br>
2. I have a job that allows me ample vacation time, and I make enough to have the freedom to travel.<br></br>
3. As of the second week of December, I will be ABD (All But Dissertation), and I have a straight A average.<br></br>
4. I am on track to survive the last of 3 grueling semesters finishing up coursework, teaching about 70 students a semester, and working in an administrative job with a lot more responsibility than my previous job (but also more money).<br></br>
5. I am already 1/4 of the way through my doctoral dissertation, and on track to finish that by Spring or early Summer.<br></br>
6. My sane family members make a positive difference in my life, and I have really great nieces (including nieces-in-law) and nephews.<br></br>
7. I still have both of my parents and they are still married.<br></br>
8. I have fantastic friends. I looked at my Facebook page, and it lists 503 friends. I realize that I personally know or have at least met more than 2/3 of those.<br></br>
Of those friends, some I have known for a very long time--between 30 and 40 years. Others I have worked with, met at conferences, met while traveling, met in school,are former students, know from the world of academia, know from the world of library science, know from various organizations I have belonged to (mostly of a spiritual nature), and know from my excursions to see certain bands like the Psychedelic Furs, Echo and the Bunnymen, and John Foxx. I wouldn't trade any of them for anything.<br></br>
9. I have some annoying health issues, but all of them are surmountable.<br></br>
10. I have finished an entire novel and it is likely it will be published in the next year.<br></br>
11. I have basically been able to do what I want with my life--I have not fallen into the trap of "you can't do that, it doesn't make money" or "There aren't enough jobs, so don't bother." <br></br>
12. Mr. Shiva, and pretty much every cat I've ever met. Dogs too. <br></br>
13. I have excellent neighbors.<br></br>
14. I have a reliable car.<br></br>
15. I have coffee.<br></br>
Note: these are in no particular order. <br></br>
I think that's a pretty good list; I may even think of other things. <br></br>
I hope you have some things to be thankful for today. I'm not particularly sentimental, but it's worth reflecting once in awhile.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-42715805111206270642015-05-26T06:55:00.000-04:002015-05-26T06:57:36.531-04:00The Landmine of Classical Mythology
Several articles have been published recently about Columbia University students who complain that <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/14/columbia-students-claim-greek-mythology-needs-a-trigger-warning/">Classical Mythology needs to be taught “with more sensitivity”</a>. Rape, incest, cannibalism and parricide/matricide are common themes of myth, and students who have survived traumas see them as “trigger” topics. If your professor ignores the horror of the scene and focuses on the beauty of the poetic meter or language, this is seen as insensitive. <br></br>
Students may have a point from at least one perspective. I think of Carol Gilligan’s long-term study of girls entitled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Joining-Resistance-Carol-Gilligan/dp/0745651690">Joining the Resistance</a>. She tells the story of Anji, a high school girl asked to write an essay on Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”. Marvell is what we term a “carpe diem” poet, and the intent of the poem is seductive. We are supposed to be drawn in by the romantic, “live for today” atmosphere of the poem. However Anji did not see it that way; to her, this was a creepy old man speaking seductively, and this was frightening to her. It was not the kind of poem she would want to read before bedtime. When she discussed her understanding of the atmosphere of the poem, she was given a poor grade for incorrectly interpreting the theme. Gilligan has always made the point that women see things differently, and that modern education and psychology has often treated this difference as “immature” or “abnormal”. Who is to say that there is a “correct” interpretation of Marvell in that sense? If we agree that there is such a thing as fallacy of intent, then how can we make assertions about what the poet is “really” saying? But literary interpretation is a subject unto itself. The point is that a young girl is confronted with a piece of canonical literature, and is graded poorly for not seeing the poem according to the canon. Similarly, students who read stories of abduction, rape and incest in Classical Mythology may be horrified, especially if they’ve ever been a victim or known a victim of these crimes, and may receive poor grades for not interpreting the text in a manner appropriate to the Classics. <br></br>
But now we need to take a step back. The great literatures of the world are not great because they deal with safe, pleasant topics. Sometimes literature is comical, but much of the literatures studied in the Humanities are about the problems of being human. Literature, art, and music are all ways in which we express things that are difficult, shocking, and even traumatizing. These arts don’t create human behavior, they mirror it. And it’s important to look in that mirror to try to understand ourselves. <br></br>
I have taught Mythology for several years now, and one thing that is clear is that myth is the same as scripture—its truth isn’t in the literal reading, but in the metaphor. When my classes study Oedipus, one of my first questions is, “So, how many of you guys out there have wanted to kill your father and marry your mother?” This usually leads to laughter, because for the most part, the idea is absurd. According to Freud, all young men have Oedipal complexes (and women have something comparable, what Jung calls the “Electra Complex”), and yet it’s clear that no one literally feels this way about their parents. My cardinal rule when reading myth is this: if it’s absurd, repellent, shocking, or fascinating, then pay attention to it, because it tells you something about yourself. It doesn’t say something literal, but something about our core psychology, about what we’re afraid of, or what we’re drawn to—and this should make us examine why this is the case. In fact, all good literature should lead to self-examination; we relate to what we’re reading through our own experience. Life is a fundamentally uncomfortable subject in the broadest sense, because in order to live, something must die. We sustain ourselves by killing plants and animals, and both are living things. This is the real question that creation mythology looks at—it’s not about rebellion against the father (in Greek mythology) or about the weakness of woman (in Biblical mythology)—it’s about the conditions of living in space and time. Creation mythology talks about a time of essential unity that is broken apart, whether it’s being banished from Eden and away from Yahweh or whether it’s Cronos (Time) castrating his father Ouranos (Sky) so that his mother Ge (Earth) can bear her children. Adam and Eve eat the fruit and recognize difference—they are in the field of time. They can’t remain in the garden of Eden, because that’s not really being “alive”—Yahweh is in the zone of eternity. And if we think about what that means, there is a lot that is paradoxical, because the field of space and time is also a field of opposites. Everything that follows creation is about expanding creation, and about creating order out of disorder. Our flood mythologies talk about the need to start all over again through rebirth, something symbolized in baptism ceremonies. Even Odysseus (Ulysses) is belched from the water onto the island of the Phaeakians, naked and looking to Nausicaa (a young princess) for help. We struggle to make sense out of life, and every now and again everything falls apart and we have to pull ourselves up, start all over again. We could be suffering from depression, our comfortable career of many years may suddenly become obsolete, a loved one we have always been with may suddenly die. There are many situations that require us to start anew, and the associated difficulty cannot be underestimated. <br></br>
Human beings are “storied” by nature; our lives run on a narrative. Bruno Bettelheim counseled young children through the reading of fairy tales. Children still live very much in the world of images—they have not been rationalized and concretized by our social and educational systems. The dilemmas of fairy tales help them solve real-life problems. For all of Richard Dawkins’ pleading, humans are not rational creatures—reason is secondary. It may not be good science to rely on “gut instinct” but most of us do that every day. We revert to whatever our “narrative” is to interpret situations, especially unexpected ones. Even Plato, that champion of Reason, made his points through metaphor and myth. Mythology tells us stories about the range of human experience, and provides something in the way of a guidepost. No myth can tell you how to live your life; it can only present you with the questions. Even reasonable adults have a narrative, and our desire for fiction books or movies allows us to explore narratives outside of our everyday experience—and even as something outside of ourselves, we can still find a way to relate to it. <br></br>
Let’s go back to the question of “triggers”. I suggest that two main factors affect our discomfort with facing trauma: the explosion of available information, and our reluctance to allow risk in children. With regard to information, it’s not something our children value. There is no need to explore a subject in depth, or to learn anything except to achieve good grades. Students frequently brag to me (and to other professors) that they’ve “never read an entire book in their life”. When they don’t know something, they pull out their phones to look for the answer online, usually through Google or a similar search engine. Judging from most of the papers I receive, they are unable to separate authoritative, evidence-based information from the rest of the drek polluting our screens. They are incredulous at the idea of using the library, and if they do, they want to find the first semi-relevant thing and get out. Information should be available to them within seconds, and if it isn’t, they immediately lose interest. <br></br>
I recall a book I read for one of my survey courses with the appetizing title <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cheese-Worms-Cosmos-Sixteenth-Century-Miller/dp/0801843871/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432637591&sr=1-1&keywords=cheese+and+the+worms">The Cheese and the Worms</a> by Carlo Ginzburg. The book is a study of the Inquisition trial of a merchant named Mennochio, and he is a puzzle to the Church authorities because he is obviously heretical, but they can’t pin down what brand of heresy he has espoused, or who taught it to him. Mennochio is literate, and has been fortunate to acquire a number of books. The number is not high by our standards—he had access to maybe 20 books. But he read every one multiple times, and spent much time thinking about them. As a result, he came up with his own independent view of the world, which was vastly different from official Church doctrine, and in fact critical of it. He did what we want our students to do—to read, re-read, think about what we’re reading, and connect it with other things we’ve read. We should come to some conclusion based on the evidence. In Mennochio’s time that was dangerous, and he was in fact found guilty of heresy and killed. There is an example of a society where information is not readily available, and among the literate there is a hunger to break out of the confines of what they are told to think and believe. We value this highly in secular culture; we have the right to think for ourselves, to draw our own conclusions. And yet—too much information is available, so it becomes overwhelming and chaotic. There is so much information coming at us every day, we can’t handle stopping and thinking about everything. We’re literally not equipped to do so—our brains can only handle so much information at one time. <br></br>
The risk factor has been <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/">talked about recently</a>, and it’s not a new problem. When I grew up, we would leave the house on our bikes on a Saturday morning, and reappear in time for lunch and dinner. We would go all kinds of places—over friends’ houses unannounced, into the woods, into broken down or unsafe structures—and this was normal. I remember the first time I heard the term “play date”—I thought “What the hell is THAT?” The playground at my elementary school lost its metal slide and jungle gym, and everything was replaced with much lower alternatives, which were of course made of plastic. Tires were cut up and put on the ground, to create a soft landing cushion if children fell. (They didn’t think about the horrible toxic odor those tires give off when it’s hot out, but that’s a different issue.) Children are not allowed to fall down or experience pain, and there’s no sense of adventure—good parents structure their children’s lives. There is no room for chaos, risk, or discovery, except perhaps in the virtual environment of video games. When I talk to friends who are parents they say, “Oh, but it’s not like when we were growing up—things are worse now.” <br></br>
Are they really?<br></br>
Concurrent with information overload is label overload. We now have labels for things that existed before, but because we have new labels and study behaviors under new labels, we decide there is “more of” something than there was in the past. Autism is a good example—are that many children really autistic? Are there more than there were before? Do there just seem to be more because we’ve tweaked the definition of the word? I don’t know the answer, but I’m suspicious when we think that human problems have changed in some fundamental way. It is more likely that we’ve just labeled and defined it differently. Sometimes this is good, because past problems that may have been ignored are now treated. But it can also lead to a zealous over-labeling of children engaged in normal developmental behavior. In short—I’m not convinced we are “worse off” now than before. The world stage changes all the time, but human nature is essentially unchanged—which is why mythology from 3,000 years ago is still relevant. <br></br>
The point is that our society has made children “soft” and overwhelmed. They are pummeled with ridiculous learning goals and an obscene amount of standardized testing, and very little time is spent slowing down, thinking, and learning. We teach them that risk is bad. This is not necessarily the parents’ fault—our litigious society is hard on parents that don’t monitor their children every second. So I am not particularly surprised that these kids grow up unable to deal with environmental “triggers”—our society has made them that way. <br></br>
Rather than soften the Classics, we need to talk more about what these myths say about ourselves. Jung noted that patients could be cured of neuroses when they realized they were not suffering alone—making the suffering mythical or universal helped patients feel that they were part of a larger system, and offered a sense of community and importance. Myth is a guide when we’re going through Hell, and unless you’re living inside a bubble (which is probably it’s own kind of Hell), you’re going to experience suffering. As Bucky Cat said in <i>Get Fuzzy</i>, “life ain’t all warm cream and dead rats”—if you’re life is on a smooth course with no problems, you’re probably not living your own life. Authentic existence requires making your own way, and that means facing your demons, not avoiding them. We don’t expand the world by hiding from it. We are naturally impatient for results, and balk at discipline, but the great irony of freedom and happiness is that it requires limitation and suffering.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-16545944198603244422014-12-31T08:47:00.001-05:002014-12-31T08:48:01.077-05:00One Art : New Year's EveThis morning I am up with the sunrise. It is probably good that I am waking up earlier and earlier, as I will have to do so for work next week. It will be some time before I can get up with the sun again, or even see it rise as I am driving to work early in the morning. It's also fortunate that I can see the sunrise--we've had several cloudy mornings that turned into beautiful days, but the early morning horizon was gray. <br></br>
I am not entirely sure why I am up so early. I stayed up late reading last night, so I should still be tired. Part of it may be aches and pains--there is something wrong with my left side, and laying perfectly flat on my back hurts. I probably need a chiropractor. I've been doing yoga in the morning to help the problem, and so far it does help but it doesn't cure it. So, that may be one reason. But more than likely it is psychological--I have had really odd dreams for the last several nights, and I've awakened with a variety of thoughts and emotions in the morning.
As a result, and perhaps because it is New Year's Eve, I am a bit reflective on the past year, and the events of the past year. <br></br>
I found myself thinking about the poet Elizabeth Bishop. She lost her father when she wasn't even a year old, and then her mother was committed to an insane asylum. She was bounced between relatives, and spent her whole life moving from place to place. She traveled all over Europe, lived in Key West, lived in Brazil. She was never quite comfortable in New England. Her poetry has that observing distance--we see glimpses of feeling but never can be quite sure of the full story. She is very much unlike her friend Robert Lowell, a dramatically confessional poet, or like Sylvia Plath. Bishop is much more understated. It took her as long as 20 years to finish some of her poems, and she only produced about 100 of them. But every word is carefully chosen, and they make their impact without dragging in a lot of personal drama. <br></br>
I think of Bishop now, and her poem <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176996">One Art</a>. The poem opens with the lines, "The art of losing isn't hard to master / so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster." In the past, I wasn't crazy about the poem and its villanelle style. Now, however, it probably is the defining poem of my life experience. At the end of the poem, Bishop writes "Even losing you (the joking voice a gesture / I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident / the art of losing isn't too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) disaster." That is the key--write it! Take the pieces of the broken structure, make some kind of art with it. <br></br>
There is always loss--people, situations, things. Sometimes people physically die, sometimes you just break off your relationship with them. Stuff breaks. If I think about the past year, there have been 2 deaths in the immediate family, at least 1 friendship that I have completely ended, a newer car with a front bumper half-destroyed by walls of snow that were like concrete, a cell phone that finally broke in half, and a laptop that is so worn out, the battery won't stay locked in the warped bottom. All my black socks have holes in the heels, my favorite sweaters are starting to look ratty, and one of two pairs of "good" shoes that I own is now torn from wear on the top. <br></br>
On the other hand--I've made new friends, gotten to know neighbors a little better, had much of my worn-out stuff replaced at Christmas, managed to finish a novel and get a chapter published, and I'm well on my way to finishing my doctorate. I'm fortunate enough that what I spend long and sometimes stressful hours doing is exactly what I enjoy doing. I will spend next semester doing a LOT of writing, and learning new techniques that I am excited about. I have lots of good friends, a few close family members, and students that I care about. There is a sense of being part of the world, not being shut away, in spite of the fact that my social time is limited during the semesters. There was a great trip to the Shetland Islands, where I made new friends, and discovered a beautiful new place. This coming year I intend to return to England, and hope to make it to France as well. Life is good--the world expands, there are new people and opportunities, there is a sense of meaning in life whether that meaning is "real" or that I simply believe it is real. <br></br>
This, perhaps, is why loss is not a "disaster". The world is still here, when one thing ends, something else begins. Winter does eventually become spring again. I've made a vow to stop hating winter. The best sunrises and sunsets occur in the wintertime--there is a clarity in the sky that you don't get in the humid summers. There's something metaphorical about that, too--death and depression are occasions to stop and re-evaluate what is, and what is important. I'm not a believer in separating "good" and "evil"--everything has a function, everything is important in its own way, even if it doesn't give us pleasure. To try to eliminate one in favor of the other is to be imbalanced. "Good" and "evil" are also subjective terms--what's good for one may be evil for another, and vice versa. We forget how to look at the world without judgment, and recognize that loss is as necessary as gain. <br></br>
So, I wish you a balanced new year. And to conclude, here is a clip of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, The Moose. Unfortunately it is not the whole poem, and is broken up by commentary, but it's still beautifully presented. I recommend reading the whole thing, which you can do <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/182292#poem">here</a>. The poem is about a journey West--really, towards "death", metaphorically--and the reassurances that occur on the journey into the unknown, culminating in the joy of seeing the moose. <br></br>
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Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-19028923586085095412014-12-29T09:13:00.000-05:002014-12-29T09:14:25.452-05:00Non-Fiction SouvenirsThe end of a back-breaking semester is always welcome; the coming of Christmas is as much for me about stopping and slowing down as it is about new beginnings, longer days, and celebrations. When the year comes to an end, I want to tidy up, finish up those last few things I'd wanted to get done, even though the timing is arbitrary. Who decided that January 1 has to be the beginning of anything? In reality, it is a day no different from any other. Yet, as a society, we've attached a meaning to this point of the calendar, which may at least have some sense if we consider our point in the wheel of the natural year. <br></br>
So, here I am at home after months of taking classes, teaching classes, working full-time, leaving the house at 6:00 in the morning and returning at 10:00 at night. The cat still wakes me up at 3:45, and the longer I'm home, the more insistent he is that I get up at this time. It's as though he's reasserting his dominance over my schedule. But alas, that will not last long, as I will return to an even more grueling schedule in late January. And that means that any new blogging will probably become sporadic at best. <br></br>
I have vowed not to take on any major house cleaning projects during this time; I spent several weeks this past summer re-arranging closets and dusting obscure corners. But there is still unfinished business; in particular, there is the pile of half-read library books sitting on my desk. Those of you who know me know that I work in a library, and have for many years. In fact, my first job ever was in a public library. I am now at a university library, weary of the changes in my profession, and the way in which it seems to be dooming itself inevitably. I hope that my fellow colleagues prove me wrong. But this is a digression. <br></br>
The pile is relatively small; I have Denis Guenoun's book "On Europe : Philosophical Hypotheses", a collection of Lydia Davis short stories, Daniel Ogden's book on Necromancy, and some Italo Calvino essays. Mind you, I have received new books for Christmas, and others that I am anxious to begin, like Jake Stratton-Kent's "Testament of St. Cyprian the Mage". I find myself feeling some guilt and a sense of unfinished duty with regard to the other volumes. So, I have been working on finishing these before starting my new ones. <br></br>
To my relief, this may not be as daunting of a task as it first appears. I finished the Davis book easily, and the Guenoun book only had about 70 pages to go. But I have another problem. When I read non-fiction, it is not enough to simply read the book and think, "Hunh! That was interesting", and send it back to the library circulation desk or put it back on the shelf. It's like visiting a new or foreign place; it's not enough to simply see it. Part of it has to come back with me. We might do this at a physical site by taking photos, or buying souvenirs (or picking one up from the site, shame shame). For me, this involves going back through the book and making notes. I can't write in a library book, so I usually have a TextEdit file or spiral notebook handy as I'm reading. If I don't do it as I go along, I have to go back and skim through everything again, making notes on key points, and pages with important quotes. If I feel the book is important material for my dissertation, I have to be even more meticulous about this process.<br></br>
When I look back through my files, I find that this is not a new thing. I have pages and pages of notes from things I've read, or at least reflections on things I've read. To my surprise, I've been doing this since at least 1986--I've found makeshift folders made by stapling together pieces of colorful construction paper, and these are full of typescript pages that have lots of cross-outs and correction fluid. My mother had what I think was an old IBM Selectric, though it may have just been a clever reproduction. Not as fancy as the "memory" typewriters that were so useful for typing catalog cards, but better than the completely manual ones. <br></br>
I made a lot of notes on philosophy and religion, which should not surprise anyone. It makes me recall an incident that occurred when I was in the 10th grade. I was sitting in the Children's Room of the Morris County Library. I'm not sure why I was there; it's possible that the main Reference Room was full. I was reading and making notes on Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy and Genealogy of Morals". It was summertime, and no one had assigned this to me; I was simply curious. The pastor of my mother's church, Father Regis, walked in to the room. He recognized me and said hello. Under his arm was a children's book--I no longer remember which one it was. He told me he was preparing for Sunday's homily. He asked what I was reading, and I showed him. "Nietzsche! Heavy stuff for high school, isn't it?"<br></br>
In retrospect, I think Father Regis was right. One can read great literature and great philosophy in high school and even as an undergraduate--one might even get "into" a particular poet, essayist, or philosopher. But the experience that enables you to understand what you're reading is lacking, for the most part. <br></br>
Maybe I should take that back--it's not that there's no experience, but typically only one dimension of the writing will "click" or make sense. I often think about this when I'm teaching Jung to my mythology students. Jung is a writer for the later part of life--35 years old or older, in body or in spirit. It's obvious that my students aren't fully grasping the importance of archetype theory. They can understand it in a limited way, but most of what Jung speaks about hasn't happened to many of them. And if it's happening to them, they generally haven't had the space of a few years to reflect on it.<br></br>
This was true of myself as well. In college I was in love with modern and "contemporary" poets like Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Elizabeth Bishop. I'm not sure I could tell you at this point why they were important to me, but they spoke to some aspect of my experience. But after years of not reading poetry, I returned to them as a doctoral student, and was knocked over by them in an entirely different way--and with the full understanding of what "modernism" was and why it was so revolutionary. But I had another 20 years of context--I could now look back at those texts and say "aha"! No doubt in another 20 years, I will be convinced that I was an idiot during my 40s. And so on. <br></br>
The point is not to disparage the lack of experience in youth; after all, it's no one's fault that they haven't lived for a period of time, and there is always someone younger or older than you in terms of experience. The point is that great literature needs to be read over and over again--what you understood in high school or as an undergrad will have an entirely new level of meaning when you are forty, and when you are sixty, and when you are eighty. The notes are helpful in making me understand what I got out of the text at the time, and I'm glad I bothered to take the time to do it. That doesn't mean I won't read the texts over again at some point, but it's useful to build on what you've already retained rather than digging a new foundation and starting all over again. In the world of writing, you never know what apparently unrelated bits of reading will become relevant to your current project. Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-3797801393535967922014-07-18T10:42:00.003-04:002014-07-18T10:47:54.920-04:00Reflections on "Rex"It is a rare July day; I have woken up to a chilly 55 degrees that is more characteristic of Fall than Summer. The cooler air tends to set my mind working, which is how I came to meditate on the notion of "Rex" over a cup of coffee at a country cafe this morning. <br></br>
I have been reading Denis Guenoun's "About Europe", which discusses Europe not as a continent, but as a universal process of returning, and Europe is a process, not an origin. Guenoun defines universality also as a process of becoming--there is always an eternal return in which something is left behind or rejected, perhaps to be revisited in the next cycle. In a discussion of Europe's rather ambiguous borders and divisions, he talks about the word "rex", which is the Latin word for "king", and the notion of a "kingdom".<br></br>
The word "rex" has its roots in "regere", which means "to trace out the limits". If we think of the word "ruler", it refers to an instrument used to measure things. Therefore, one who "rules" measures out the limits--the "rex" is the one who sets limits or boundaries. Guenoun quotes Beneviste: "<i>Regere fines</i> means literally 'trace out the limits by straight lines'. This is the operation carried out by the high priest before a temple or a town is built and it consists in the delimitation on a given terrain of a sacred plot of ground ... The tracing of these limits is carried out by the person invested with the highest powers, the rex" (Guenoun 63).<br></br>
This immediately calls to mind the ancient role of the King in fertility rituals and cycles--he is wooed in the Spring, crowned in the Summer, cut down in the Fall. A new King is born in the Winter, and the process starts again. Besides the obvious relationship to the cycle of the sun, the seasons and the harvests, could this not also be a metaphor for tearing down boundaries by killing the boundary-maker? The Celts marked their new year on Samhain, which we now think of as Halloween. For them, it was the end of Fall and the beginning of Winter. So, not only is this the death of the King, it is the time when the boundaries between the worlds are thin, and the ancestors return. Does the boundary leave with the boundary-maker? <br></br>
It may be possible to extend this metaphor to Christianity. The old "dying and resurrecting vegetation god", the old "King", is replaced by Christ, who is indeed a mythological "King", and is cut down and reborn. The liturgical cycle places the death of Christ at another boundary point--the beginning of Spring, close to Beltane. It is as though the Christ image mirrors that of the mythical Sun King. This is in many ways deliberate, as the new religion conquered the European continent by assimilation. Most Christian holidays and traditions are Christianized versions of earlier pagan ones. It is much easier to convert someone when you claim to believe the same thing, just with different names. And in many ways--for all the differences and divisions that Christianity has brought, it still has an element of the ancient world and its beliefs. These are archetypal, and do not go away with new ideologies or prophets. The pagan ways become a mirror "Shadow" of the God King. <br></br>
This idea of "rex" as boundary-maker makes me think immediately of the Greek god Hermes, whose very nature is associated with boundaries. The rather graphic property markers used by the ancient Greeks, which consisted of a slab of stone with a male head carved at the top, and explicit genitals carved at the bottom, were known as "herma".<br></br>
The Greek word for Hermes is Ἑρμῆς, and its etymology is unknown. The word "rex" is Indo-European in its roots, and bears similarities to the Gaulish <i>rig</i> and <i>rix</i>, and also to the Sanskrit <i>raja</i>. According to the OED, there is a second obscure definition of the word "rex" that is related to <i>reaks</i>, and it means to be capricious or to play pranks or tricks. This is striking, because cunning and trickery are also attributes of the god Hermes. This may be an etymological coincidence, but interesting nonetheless.<br></br>
Hermes is also connected with the underworld, and frequently crosses the boundaries between the chthonic and the celestial. The King is one who is a keeper of boundaries, and this would likely include upholding tradition. However, if the King is thought of as the High Priest, then he is the one who has access to the sacred, and indeed in many cultures, is sacred himself. This would give him similar characteristics to the shaman, who is taboo to general society, but whose role is critical in the survival of the tribe. The shaman's chief characteristic is his ability to travel between this world and the "other" one, however that is defined. There is a common boundary in these roles between the sacred and the profane. I would argue that the King is more limited in his ability to cross these boundaries--he is there to uphold the "law", not abolish it. <br></br>
For all that he has in common with the role of "Rex", Hermes is never seen in the role of a King. Hermes is the god of thieves and merchants. He identifies more with the common people. In this way, he may be a mirror image of the "Rex"--they are two sides of the same coin. Guenoun talks about the role of the sovereign state and the church in European history. It was often true that the Pope wanted to be King, and the King wanted to be Pope. In the development of a state with a King, there ends up being three divisions--the royal families and aristocracy (who hold political power), the Church and its officials (who are a spiritual mirror image of the State power), and then there is a third category--a blank space, the rest of society that has no influence on the theological-political sphere whatsoever. This is the general "society", and both the government and the church are generally removed from it. In such a system, the only way to gain anything is to know how to bend the rules without breaking them, or breaking them without being detected. This is the domain of Hermes. <br></br>
Hermes is also a Trickster figure, so in this way he may be the mocking shadow of the King, more like the fool or court jester. Psychologically, it is the influence that breaks our internal boundaries--those life events that trash our five-year-plans and our sense of control over our environment. But, like the King and the Fool, they are likely two sides of the same coin, and the Trickster is internal rather than external. In the Tarot, the Fool has the number 0, which makes it nothing and absolute at the same time. The trump King in the deck is the Emperor, and he rests at the 4th trump position--between the Emperor and the Fool are the Magician, the High Priestess, and the Empress. The order is also something to reflect on, as both the Magician and the High Priestess are sacred boundary crossers themselves, and the Empress represents creative possibility. The Emperor is followed by the Hierophant or Pope, who represents the spiritual kingship of the Church. So, the Emperor has tradition over him, and risk and possibility beneath him. He takes control and draws the line.<br></br>
I don't know that I have any particular place to "get" to with these reflections, except that they are another metaphorical way of looking at how ideas about social boundaries reflect psychological ones. Myth and metaphor are not one-dimensional, and they certainly aren't literal. They help express the structures and symbols that we have created for ourselves to interpret the world as we experience it.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-6760474857606328082014-06-27T21:58:00.001-04:002014-06-28T09:15:05.276-04:00The Soldier and the Seer (Rutgers University, June 23 2014)(Warning: this is a REALLY long post.) <br></br>
My friend Phil sent me a private Facebook message a couple of weeks ago, with an event on the O.T.O. calendar and the message, "Are you going to this?" "This" was a colloquium entitled "The Soldier and the Seer : J.F.C. Fuller, Aleister Crowley, and the British Occult Revival." It was being held at none other than Rutgers University, New Brunswick. The colloquium was being held of in relation to an exhibition entitled "Unheard of Curiosities : An Exhibition of Rare Books on the Occult and Esoteric Sciences." I could not pass up an event so close to home. So, this past Monday, I took the route that I used to take on Wednesday evenings to teach Cataloging and Classification at what was then the School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies. The event was in Alexander Library's Pane Room, and I reflected that this would be much more interesting than the usual NJLA workshop commonly held in that same room.<br></br>
I was surprised to learn that Rutgers had the papers of J.F.C. Fuller, a British military man who was more commonly known for being a sort of godfather of tank warfare. I was aware of the Crowley/Fuller connection, as Crowley made Fuller a Chancellor of the A.A., an organization meant to succeed the esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn, and that has some overlap with the Ordo Templi Orientis. In fact, it was Academia Ordo Templi Orientis that was co-sponsoring the event. There was an amazing list of speakers, and I was very much looking forward to the event. I was not disappointed. <br></br>
Associate University Archivist Erika Gorder spoke about the exhibition and the collections, noting that the occult books came largely (if not entirely) from the collection of Clement Fairweather, a scholar who lived in Metuchen, and was more known for his work on humor, though he was also a scholar of horror literature, in particular the work of H.P. Lovecraft. It was William Sloane who contacted Fuller about acquiring his papers, and received them because he did not think anyone else would want them. <br></br>
Gordan Djurdjevic was the first speaker, who gave an overview of Academia Ordo Templi Orientis and its mission. It is made up of O.T.O. initiate members, and currently membership is by invitation only. The group was formed in 2011, and is dedicated to interdisciplinary scholarship with respect to Western Esotericism, Thelema, and Crowley, as studying all aspects of esotericism helps to illuminate O.T.O. teachings. He noted the need to separate scholarship from practice, as the theoretical study of subjects related to magic would not include one's personal practical experiences--these would be difficult to write about in a scholarly context. He also addressed the question of "objectivity" from "insiders", which is a basic consideration in Religious Studies. It is often argued that "insiders" lack objectivity on the subject, but as Gordan noted, an agenda-less objective view is a construct itself. The American Academy of Religion approves both inside and outside approaches. Certainly in the field of Religious Studies, there is much academic work in the field of Christian theology by believers. There is really no reason that Thelemites can't write about esotericism. <br></br>
The next speaker was Henrik Bogdan, who gave an introduction to the study of Western Esotericism, to put the Fuller/Crowley relationship into context, and to address the question of why we should study Crowley. Esoteric beliefs tend to share the idea of a Godhead manifest in the natural world, a microcosm/macrocosm construct, though their correspondences differ significantly. Western Esotericism is a comparatively recent field; there was not much scholarship prior to Francis Yates' work on the subject. He noted that historians of religion tended to view esoteric views as "heresies", and therefore not part of theology, and therefore not studied by theologians. On the continuum between Christian doctrine and pure rationality, Western Esotericism lies somewhere in between, resisting the dogmatism of both approaches. Esotericism stresses the experience of gnosis, that experience of the one true Self, or one's ground of being. There was always a link between science and esotericism, until rational, modern science distanced itself from any kind of "metaphysical" thinking. Antoine Faivre was probably the first scholar to try to come up with a single definition of esotericism that applied to various groups, and he suggested that these groups share a family resemblance--they are a form of thought that includes the idea of correspondences, the idea of living nature, the use of imagination and meditations, the experience of transmutation, and the praxis of concordances, among other elements. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Kocku Von Stuckrad altered this definition, as Faivre's view tended to view esotericism and its literature as something static, referring only to older sources. Hanegraaff and Von Stuckrad both suggest that esotericism is dynamic and changes over time. It tends to consist of rejected or polemic knowledge, a kind of "mirror image" of the prevalent culture. Understanding Western Esotericism is fundamental to the history of Western culture, and indeed will cause aspects of it to be rewritten. It also helps scholars with issues of identity, identifying and confronting scholarly prejudice. Crowley in particular is important because he is a "religious synthesist". Rather than being a regression to the Middle Ages, magical study and practice was in fact a harbinger of modernity. It looked to science and philosophy rather than Biblical inerrancy, and could be summed up in Crowley's motto for the A.A., "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion". Crowley felt that both religious and scientific approaches were limited, and failed to answer their own questions--magick was the "third way" that synthesized both. Crowley and his influence provides us, in Henrik's words, "a window on the dialectics of Christianity, rationalism, and modernism." J.F.C. Fuller had a revolt against Christianity in common with Crowley, and for Fuller this lead to agnosticism. Crowley and Fuller met when Fuller ended up being the only contestant in an essay contest on Crowley's works, and resulted in the publication of Fuller's "The Star in the West". Fuller brought his friend Victor Neubig into the A.A., and oversaw many A.A. probationers. He broke with Crowley after a scandal involving George Cecil Jones, when Crowley would not take the stand in his libel suit against "The Looking Glass". <br></br>
Gordan Djurdjevic spoke again, this time on Buddhism and Yoga presented as "The Temple of Solomon the King" in the Equinox, volume 4. He spoke about the practice of concordance and the translation of cultures, as well as the "Easternization of the West" in esoteric practices. The Order of the Golden Dawn incorporated no Eastern practices except for tattva. The A.A. and the O.T.O. both incorporate Eastern practices. Much can be credited to Crowley's involvement with Alan Bennett, who taught Buddhism based on reason rather than on fate. Crowley's "BERASHITH" was intended to be a "sangha of the West", and based more on mathematical rather than mystical comments. Gordan suggests that Crowley did not significantly change his ontology after receiving Liber AL vel Legis in 1904. Crowley was distrustful of monism, because it was rooted in the concept of illusion, and he believed that empirical reality was factual. He rejected any kind of absolutism, suggesting that the only "absolute" thing was zero.<br></br>
Crowley's Buddhism may have prepared him mentally for the receiving of the the Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis), although he had an aversion to specific passages, specifically the idea in the second book that "existence is pure joy". Eventually Crowley abandoned Buddhism, thinking that the Buddhist precepts were really a joke, as they could never really be fulfilled. He believed that the Atman was capable of change, the "Self" dynamic and fluid. While Crowley instead embraced the idea of "Love is the Law, Love Under Will", his ontological views did not substantially change. <br></br>
Richard Kaczynski spoke about J.F.C. Fuller's continued interest in the occult after his break with Crowley in 1911. He gave a visual review of Fuller's publications, from the Agnostic Journal in 1904 to his works on yoga and the Qabalah in the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote many articles for the Occult Review. In spite of his break with Crowley, it was clear that Fuller still read his works and collected them. Of note was his article "The Black Arts" in the Occult Review of January 1926 (illustrated by Austin Osman Spare), which may have influenced Gerald Gardner's conception of Wicca. While it is known that Gardner paraphrased much from Crowley, some of Fuller's made-up incantations in this article appear in Gardner's Samhain ritual. While not a central remark to the presentation, I found it interesting that Robert Lowell felt that Fuller was as good at what he did as Bertrand Russell was in philosophy. I had not seen a reference to this in Lowell's interviews and letters, but I also wasn't looking for it at the time I reviewed them. <br></br>
Chris Giudice spoke about Fuller's connection to the Fascist movement, and his relationship with Hitler and the Nazi party. Anti-democratic feeling was an accompaniment to modernism--there was a rebellion against progressive/Marxist ideology, and Fascism was as much a system of thought as it was a political idea. Italy was the first to embrace this rebellion, and in Germany, National Socialism was a reaction against French Revolution values--discipline, law, and order were hailed. The onset of the Great Depression also did much to facilitate the spread of fascism. Fuller was an intellectual, and like many others, he was attracted to both mysticism and fascism--Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats are examples of others with similar interest. Fuller's ideas on the military, particularly on tank warfare, were not well received in Britain, but elicited great interest in Europe. He was called upon to advise Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco in their military operations. One wonders how things might have been different if his home country had taken him seriously, as his military writings gave Germany in particular a great advantage in World War II. Fuller did appear to hold some anti-Semitic views, though he ultimately wrote that anti-Semitism should not have a place in the British state, in his writings for Mosley's British Fascist group. It is notable that Fuller and his wife attended Hitler's 50th birthday party, and they were the English minority at that event. It is not held that Fuller was a traitor, and I do wonder how he felt after viewing the aftermath of World War II, especially in Germany.<br></br>
Bob Stein gave the next lecture on Crowley, Alphabets, and Liber 231. Liber 231 is a technical treatise on the Tarot, and presented by Fuller in the Equinox Volume 1. Bob noted that there were no numbers on the original Tarot decks, and no particular sequence. The Sefer Yetzirah was later tied to the numbering order of the cards, as well as the zodiac. The alphabet comes from Eliphas Levi, though there was an earlier version of this alphabet. <br></br>
The sequence of cards was changeable from the time of the Marseilles Tarot. The Fool originally had no number, and adding the zero shifted the numbers of the other cards up by one. He notes that Justice came before Strength, which is out of sequence in terms of the zodiac (putting Libra before Leo). Crowley's work 777 points out both the Qabalistic and zodiacal correspondences, and was written prior to the Book of the Law. Bob spoke about the definition of a "Class A" publication of the A.A., and its authoritative value. Much of Crowley's writings on the Tarot are from Class A, except for Liber CDXVIII (The Vision and the Voice, 1st Aethyr), which is both A and B. <br></br>
The correspondence of the Hebrew letter "Tzaddi" in the Tarot was explored in the Book of the Law (e.g., "Tzaddi is not the Star"), and Crowley makes some comment on this in the extenuation commentary (available in "The Law is for All"). Tzaddi ends up being the letter and number of the Emperor (IV), and in Liber VII (Lapis Lazuli), Crowley has the line, "only the fish-hook can draw me out", another reference to Tzaddi. Liber 231 itself switches Heh and Vav in the chart relating to the genii of Mercurii and the Qlipoth. Here Strength and Justice are put in their correct zodical order, Ra Hoor Khuit is associated with the Emperor, and Tzaddi is associated with the Star. <br></br>
Bob made reference to Liber 27 (vel Trigrammaton), which tried to apply the English alphabet to the Tarot sequence--it did not work. By the time of the Vision and the Voice, the Tarot sequence was established and consistent. He made some other comments on the attribution of Tzaddi in the Book of Thoth, and suggests that the Vision and the Voice, 1st Aethyr, resolves Tarot questions. Bob did not attempt to interpret the meaning of any of these correspondences; he merely put them out for Thelemites to ponder.<br></br>
The last presentation was by William Breeze, and it was on the O.T.O. Archives. He mentioned Hans "Hansi" Hammond (who shows up as the character Dionysus in Crowley's "Diary of a Drug Fiend"), and connects him with Rutgers University and the acquisition of the Fuller papers. I may have misunderstood him, but I believe he said that Hammond was actually University Librarian at Rutgers (I haven't been able to verify this independently as of yet.). If I heard that correctly, that is quite a startling connection between Crowley and Rutgers--Hammond was the son of Leah Hirsig, and William showed scans of newspaper articles about Hammond and Crowley when Hammond was a child. He then discussed Crowley scholarship up to 1974, mentioning Ellic Howe's "Magicians of the Golden Dawn" and "Eliphas Levi and the Occult Revival", as well as James Webb's "Flight From Reason". He stressed that archival evidence is key to Western Esoteric study, and mentioned Marco Pasi and Henrik Bogdan as particularly working with the O.T.O. He then gave a list of Crowley archives around the world at various universities, and mentioned several Masters and Doctoral Theses on Crowley (including the one by my friend Philip Jensen at UT Austin in 2000). Graduate programs in Western Esotericism have come about in Europe, and Religious Studies departments in the United States and elsewhere are starting to expand to include esoteric currents. <br></br>
William then went on to tell the story of how Liber AL vel Legis was lost twice--first by Crowley (later found with some skis at Boleskine House in storage--William theorizes that the shape of the box with the book, which was on a large roll in a rectangular box, was probably stored with the skis by his servants, as they were about the same length and shape as the box). The second time was after the death of Karl Germer in California. After Karl's death, robbers broke into the house where Sascha Germer was still living, and stole many items related to the O.T.O. When Grady Louis McMurtry went through the house after Sascha's death, he could not find Liber AL vel Legis, and assumed it was stolen. Somehow it ended up in the basement of a house in Oakland, California in 1984, which had been purchased by a bibliophile who saw the work, and realized its value. After consulting with a friend (who happened to be in the O.T.O.) and Israel Regardie, he asked about donating it to the O.T.O. Regardie responded with the understatement, "That would be a nice thing to do."<br></br>
There was a discussion of the alleged "title page" of Liber AL vel Legis, which William does not think was a title page at all. He also discussed Liber 231, looking at Rutgers' copy, which has the genii illustrations, but no Hebrew lettering. An infrared scan of the original shows where the Hebrew letters had been penciled in and erased. It is an example of how primary source material helps interpretation. <br></br>
After this there was a brief panel discussion, in which it was noted that the proceedings to this conference would be published. When asked about the future of Esoteric and Crowley studies and what they would like to see, William Breeze suggested that he would like to see a Chair of Crowley Studies (a suggestion made to Marco Pasi, who held a postdoc position at the Warburg Institute--Pasi responded, "That will never happen."). A question on fascism and Thelema led to Chris Giudice's recommendation of the book "Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics". William Breeze also noted that Liber OZ represents the political platform of the O.T.O. <br></br>
This was the end of a long and interesting day, and I haven't even mentioned the exhibition itself. If you are in New Jersey, this is the last week to see it, so try to drop by Alexander Library at Rutgers before July 3. There are many fascinating esoteric works on display, as well as some of Fuller's letters, original Crowley and Fuller works, and some creative exhibitions that incorporate pop culture works on the occult along with classic volumes.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-50941010538748928572014-06-04T07:35:00.002-04:002014-06-04T07:49:12.176-04:00"Slender Man" and the Psychology of StoriesAs someone whose primary interest is myth, religion and folklore, I was naturally interested in the <a href="http://jezebel.com/explainer-whats-slender-man-and-why-would-two-girls-ki-1585377547">bizarre stabbing this week that took place in Wisconsin</a>. Two girls tried to murder a third to appease something called "Slender Man", an Internet meme that was apparently created as part of a contest to create a "paranormal" creature. There is a Blair-Witch style backstory, and even a video that supposedly tells the origins of "Slender Man", a Chthulu-like figure that lives in the forest. Many people are fans of this story in the same way one might be a fan of Lovecraft and his monsters. <br></br>
Slender Man is described as a meme in some places, and as an urban legend in others. Urban legends are a version of local folklore--someone tells a story that they swear is true from a "friend of a friend", and it gets spread with even more variations. They may potentially have a grain of truth to them, though they are not necessarily "true". I question whether or not this is an urban legend per se; however, the more relevant question might be, can Internet memes become urban legends? As Jezebel.com noted, there is a "clear paper trail" for this tale--it is not one of those stories told many times over and the origins get lost, like stories of "Resurrection Mary". It was clearly intended as fiction. <br></br>
Why would two girls believe this is true? And do they really believe it is true, or is this just a way of getting out of murder prosecution? All the details on the girls, their background, and their relationship to the third girl are still unknown. This is hardly the typical response to a fictional story, even if you want to believe it.<br></br>
Part of me wants to look at the story and ignore it, as I'm sure there will be a thousand half-baked theories as to what is going on, and people don't necessarily need to hear mine. I don't claim to understand the reason at all. But as the same Jezebel article noted, the potential for this to turn into something like the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s is pretty darn good. So, for better or for worse, I feel a need to step back and look at what is going on here. That's what I'm paid to do in at least part of my life. <br></br>
So--first--this is one type of illustration of what Jung meant when he said that "imagination is a fact". Slender Man is clearly fiction, and yet the impact he has is very real. He takes on a psychological reality manifest in the actions of the girls. Now, I anticipate two reactions--one says that Slender Man is still not REAL, the girls are just deluded at best and crazy at worst. The other will try to compare it to religion, but religion arises out of a natural need to negotiate the unknown. While Slender Man may have represented something to the individual psyches of the girls, I do not think you can convincingly compare him to a "deity". This is an isolated incident; there are no mass gatherings of Slender Man worshippers. That would be a different situation entirely. <br></br>
If Slender Man resembles Chthulu in some respect, it may be worth considering the symbolism of that monster, and other Lovecraftian monsters. Lovecraft, as I've said before, was a hardcore materialist. He had no knowledge of the occult, and did not believe in souls, life after death, or religion. In fact, his monsters represent the blind forces of the universe. They will trample you in a moment, because they have no interest in you, and you are nothing compared to them. As Robert Price once pointed out, "the Devil at least takes an interest in your soul." These monsters do not. It might be fitting that new monsters in our mechanical/automatic worldview are as indifferent as Chthulu. At least its a switch from zombies.<br></br>
This brings to mind another fictional phenomenon that people believe is real--Lovecraft's Necronomicon. Supposedly it is an ancient work written by Abdul Al-Hazra that reveals ancient incantations for bringing these Titanic monsters into the world. This is entirely fictional, but occult bookstore owners have probably lost count of the number of times they've been asked for the "real" Necronomicon. Even my ex-husband believed it was real; and actually tried some of the rituals, to some effect (according to him). It's very difficult to convince people it's fiction once they've decided it is real; this is true about false ideas in the world as well. Example: the notion that vaccinations cause autism. That has been debunked long ago, but many still believe it. <br></br>
So, we've seen how we can transform fictional things into "real" things in our minds. The Satanic Panic was another example. Real Satanists have no interest in stealing children or in human sacrifice, or in torturing children. Like "Slender Man" it is a "mythical" manifestation of a different issue. When I say "mythical", I don't mean false. I mean it is a metaphorical story that may tell us something about the point of view in question. Myth is either fascinating, repellent, or indifferent. In the latter case, the myth is obsolete, or at least useless to the indifferent individual. In the two former cases, it says something about the neurotic, conflicted, or potentially psychotic nature of the fascinated or repelled individual (or group). If we don't relate to the story in some fashion, it has no meaning for us. Fears of Slender Man, Satan, or any other frightening being are symptomatic of a personal or social fear that we don't want to confront.<br></br>
Which brings us to the reality of the story itself. Even fictional stories may be metaphorical of some collective fear or desire--that's what makes them popular. I have always argued against things like scriptural literalism, because I feel people are doing exactly what these girls are doing--taking something symbolic (or potentially symbolic) to be a reality. Years ago, one of my professors likened it to believing in Santa Claus--we believe literally as children, we don't believe as adults, but we still appreciate the symbolism and perhaps the tradition. Literal belief does occur among children, and it's not a bad thing, it's a state of development. Usually the beliefs are acted out in play, which is again entirely appropriate. Acting things out is a good preparation for being faced with adult situations, as fairy tales often attempt to solve difficult real world problems in fantastic ways. (See Bruno Bettelheim's "Uses of Enchantment" for some good examples of this.)<br></br>
In this case, as they say, "sh*t got real". This is not two girls pretending that Slender Man is real--they are taking very disturbing action in the belief that he is literally real. This suggests an inability to draw lines between what is psychological and what is material. That could be an indication of something like schizophrenia (very unlikely, I think), or it could be a continuation of a worldview that assumes that for something to be "real" it has to be a "fact". As it was once said by another wise professor, "Facticity does not equal truth". <br></br>
So, some of that is the ironic fallout of the scientific worldview. While the notion of Biblical inerrancy predated the rational era, to a certain extent it is the product of rational thinking about the Bible. The underlying notion is that for the Bible to be true, it must all be factual. It's not--and in fact, the Bible stands up much better as "truth" if it is read metaphorically, and in the context of the time when it was written. The need to make something that fascinates us "real" in a material sense may suggest that in order for our feelings to be validated in terms of the idea, it has to be made manifest. We want to see "material proof", the only thing we accept as evidence, even when dealing with the non-material. This can be good--if an inventor dreams of a particular kind of machine and then builds it, that is a positive. In this case, making Slender Man real by murdering someone is a decided negative. <br></br>
What does any of this prove? It proves that the psyche is like fire--it can create or destroy, yet it is neither good or bad in and of itself. This is not an argument for rigidly controlling the psyche, because that is impossible--the more you try to do that, the less control you actually have. It's a bit like trying not to think of pink elephants--as soon as you decide that, you can think of nothing but pink elephants. It is also not an argument for "controlling" what children are exposed to--these girls were 12, which is really more adolescence than childhood. The best you can do is to allow children and adolescents to express themselves without judgment--especially with adolescents. You can't tell them what to do meaningfully, so it's better to say, "Yeah, I get what you're saying--but did you also think about this?" Teaching how to balance what is felt with what is reasonable behavior goes a long way. <br></br>
Of course, this could all be a lot of BS. We don't know all the circumstances surrounding this case. But I would still say it is prudent to not take an individual case and turn it into a nationwide epidemic. There is more going on here than meets the eye, and it is best to reserve judgment until all facts are known. Slender Man is no more responsible for deaths than heavy metal music, Chthulu, Satan, or anything else deemed monstrous or rebellious. If Slender Man is symbolic of anything in this case, it is fear of the future and the unknown. Work on improving that instead of trying to suppress or eliminate fictional, mythical, or religious characters.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-72830099542078199272014-06-03T10:50:00.001-04:002014-06-03T10:56:18.352-04:00The Value of the NegativeI've been seeing a lot lately about the value of "positive thinking", and the destructive and painful influence of hate and negative thoughts. This is hardly a new idea; books like "The Power of Positive Thinking" and "You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought" are classics of self-help literature. "The Secret" and its discussion of the "law of attraction" certainly correlates to this idea, by suggesting that what you affirm comes to you. If you think positively about an outcome, that outcome will happen. In general, I have no disagreement with this approach. It's healthy to see loss and setback as opportunity for positive change, and a positive outlook on life generally makes you happier. <br></br>
However, there are some difficulties with this approach. First--life is not all "positive" experiences. We tend to define positive experiences as those that make us emotionally happy, or at least as those experiences that do not harm us. Negative experiences are seen as traumatizing and harmful. While there are probably some black-and-white examples, these terms are often subjective. As my guru has said, "A rash of deaths in a town may be bad for the families but good for the undertaker." A lot of it has to do with perspective. <br></br>
A little side note about myself--I am extremely emotionally sensitive. This might surprise you if you know me, because I don't come across that way a lot of the time. I often take my father's approach to tragedy--I say "Hmm, that's too bad" and go back to whatever I was doing. Some people therefore assume that I am uncaring. In fact, the opposite is true--I'm in danger of caring too much. Some people have defined me as "empathic", and that could be true. I am like the house on the hurricane-battered coast; in order to defend my house, I build a wall around it. I take a somewhat stoic view of life, because I am intellectually aware that life is paradoxical in that it always brings death, whether I like it or not. But I do listen to others, and I am genuinely interested when students or friends come to me with issues, either to have someone help or just to have someone to listen. I am very wary of those who I feel manipulate and take advantage of my good nature--that is the fast track to being on my permanent sh*tlist. <br></br>
One thing I don't share about myself often to the wide world is that I read Tarot. I have read Tarot since about 1986, and the reason has to do with what it tells me about the unconscious. It is a psychological tool. Jung believed that Tarot worked through the principle of synchronicity--the order of cards is technically meaningless, yet in looking at them, they seem to give a message about something that has bothered me, or gives me a sense of where I'm at when I feel at a loss. In this way, they work the same as dream symbols--they are something to be interpreted that tells us about what the archetypes are doing in our lives. There are Jungian therapists who use Tarot in this way. If they tell you about the future, it is also through the synchronicity principle, as accessing the collective unconscious means accessing something not bound by space and time. <br></br>
I almost never do public readings, and I've never really done them for money. One exception was a charity event where a friend asked if I would read, and donate the proceeds to the charity. I agreed to do it, and I was stunned by the long lines of people who wanted me to read for them. They were all people hurting terribly--suffering with cancer, having lost close family members, etc. By the time we were closing up I was STILL finishing readings. I went home that night feeling dizzy, and spent much of the next morning throwing up. I absorb people's grief like a sponge. This is also why I don't watch many movies--anything that hits my senses directly is like a raw hit in the gut, even if others can laugh it off. It's never been easy for me to do that. Academia and analytic thinking has served as a barrier for me against raw emotion. I think of it as a balancing act. Some rational distance from emotion is a good thing, just as having a small creek or pond is nice, as opposed to be threatened by ocean waves at your front door. <br></br>
This is also the main quarrel between my mother and I. My mother is another one who feels grief deeply, but she does not put up barriers, and it is destroying her physically, if not psychologically. And the reason leads to my next point--she feels guilty, as though she is a compassionless person by putting up boundaries. <br></br>
We are not martyrs, and have a right not to experience painful things all the time. We all develop coping mechanisms. But part of the problem as a society is that our mythology tells us that having negative or bad thoughts is, well, "bad". In religious terms, it is "sinful". In my mother's case, she was raised by a Catholic Church that told her that God read all her thoughts and counted the bad ones against her. She is not alone in this kind of upbringing, though I can't say that was entirely my upbringing. What I say is--YES, you have negative thoughts, and YES it is perfectly fine to have them. The best place to operate from is the Center, and in the Center neither good nor bad thoughts prevail--it just IS. But our lives tend to swing from one side to the other, and that is OK--in a certain sense, we are all trying to achieve Hegelian synthesis, or use what Jung calls "the transcendent function". It is better to integrate the experience rather than to repress it or get hopelessly lost in it. <br></br>
What we define as "negative" can also vary depending on our upbringing. For instance, some people think that lustful or rebellious thoughts are "bad". It is those thoughts in particular, as well as our genuine emotional expressions when we feel hurt, that I am referring to when I say it's OK to have negative thoughts. <br></br>
Carl Jung stated that "the brighter the light, the darker the shadow". I am moderately suspicious of people who are positive/happy/loving all the time. If your light is very bright, I sincerely hope that you are addressing your shadow, and not trying to externalize it, offload it, or make it go away. There is only one kind of mythical creature without a shadow, and that is a vampire. All of us feel what is "negative" and what is dark. Why else is Grumpy Cat so popular, the sweet kitty who tells you to go jump off a cliff? Why do undergraduate females in particular love the rage and angst of Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" poems? Why do we love the cynical, dark humor of Dorothy Parker? Because deep down, we all rebel against a world that is a mask of positivity. Like the Christmas truce of the troops in World War I, occasionally we like to play ball with the "bad guys" (who, by the way, are not necessarily "bad"). The deep psychological split between what is "good" and what is "evil" has convinced us that every thought outside of what we deem "good" is something about which we should feel guilty and ashamed. This is a problem.<br></br>
The "problem" lies in the simple phenomena of psychological projection. If you do not own your own "badness" and feel OK with it, then you only see it in others and never in yourself. This leads to self-righteousness (I'm so good, and that other person is a creep), and sometimes outright persecution of others. In the worst cases, it leads to genocide--exterminating a people because they are full of so-called "negative" characteristics that might taint the "pure" ones. I don't need to tell you how that worked out in World War II Germany. And though many fundamentalists would never commit genocide or murder, there is the sense of avoiding "sinful" people unless you are trying to "save" them. Being the "good" one (or ones) while everyone else is "bad" is a problem, and it comes from not owning your own badness. "God" may be inside of you, but so is the "Devil", and they're not as separate as you would think. If Satan tests Job with God's approval, that tells you something about the nature of that relationship. The "devil" or "trickster" appears in your life to make you uncomfortable, and usually it's for your own benefit, if you have decided that living complacently with something harmful to you is better than confronting it. If one hasn't wrestled with life and suffering to some degree, they haven't lived it. <br></br>
Alan Watts said in his eulogy at Carl Jung's death that he admired Jung "because Jung knew that he was a villain, and didn't have guilt about it." If you can't embrace your own darkness, then you will judge others, not forgive them. You will not recognize that you too are capable of "bad" things, not realize that someone's hurtful mistake could just as easily be your own. <br></br>
In this sense, I am against being "positive" all the time, because we need to admit when we're not positive without shame. As I said to someone recently, this doesn't mean that we direct our anger, hatred, and hurt to others in harmful ways. You can be angry at your ex without chucking a brick through his or her window, even if you feel like it. Both ignoring our feelings and getting obsessed with them long term is not helpful. Balance is important.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-28745222640921201242014-06-01T20:54:00.001-04:002014-06-01T20:58:19.547-04:00Inversions, and the Idea of MeaningI have never been one for light reading, for the most part. My Sunday morning breakfast reading is Burt Alpert's "Inversions". If you've never heard of it, don't be surprised. It is a 464-page, typewritten book that was self-published by Alpert in 1973. I heard of it in a 1970s librarian "zine" called the "U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D Librarian". It was typewritten and mimeographed on colored paper, and I recall that even the first public library I worked for in the 1980s had copies of this zine. I came across a copy from 1975 in university periodicals one day, and happened upon a review of this book. It was described as "mind-blowing". It made me interested enough to see if I could find a copy. Sure enough, Amazon had one for about 5 bucks. <br></br>
I believe I have mentioned this book before, as I have started it many times, and have been waylaid by other distractions. I am still in the first section, and there is enough in it to supply multiple blog postings. But one thing that has interested me is Alpert's notion of the heroic. In Mythology, we think of the heroic as part of a journey towards full maturity, or towards being a full integrated or individuated human being, in Jungian terms. Alpert sees heroism as self-sacrifice, and views it as a "cop-out". He thinks of the notion of sacrificing one's life for a cause, even for a resistance. To quote:<br></br>
<i>Most people regard this exchange as being unreasonable, and those who call for it self-serving fanatics. Having rejected an ethic of oppression which has sanctified self-sacrifice, people are not about to accept self-sacrifice as part of an ethic of resistance. If immolation of the self is the meaning of total commitment to struggle, then they would rather make what little life they can have within the cracks. Even when they sense this is no longer possible in an era of total commitment, still, dying the creeping death of acquiescence seems preferable to committing oneself to the instant death of heroism. (p. 8)</i> <br></br>
By "total commitment" he means the idea that one should be entirely devoted to a job, or to a cause, that involves giving up one's own self. Today we can see this in corporate jobs that demand well over 40 hours a week, and destroy any semblance of a personal life for the individual. This reminds me of Joseph Campbell's urging towards finding one's "authentic self"--the quest for the Holy Grail, figuratively speaking. Usually this is a quest made on your own, on untrodden ground, as it was with Arthur's knights. There is a certain isolation in the quest, as your family and/or the society around you may not support you on your path. <br></br>
Living authentically is difficult, to say the least, and Alpert addresses this conundrum. He speaks about the idea of revolution, and cites Abbie Hoffman's phrase, "Revolution for the hell of it!" as being more sensible. "The revolution must be born of joy, and not of sacrifice" (p. 10). He mentions the failure of both religion and psychology to deal with the conflict between the authentic self and society. He cites R.D. Laing's lament that "being out of your mind" is the normal condition for humans in our society. Not much has changed since 1973. There is a deeply felt sickness in humans--a sense that the self is lost in the demands of society. <br></br>
Alpert's solution to this conundrum is to make one's work meaningful--no matter what it is. Our attempts to make our own creative mark on the world and to do things with awareness of meaning for the rest of the world can possibly change things a little at a time, individual by individual. Put more simply, one lives authentically by living according to their passion. We are trained to believe that our life's goal is to make money, to choose an education that fits a potentially lucrative career, and to aspire to certain material goals and standards. There's nothing wrong with having material goals, but as Joseph Campbell has said, "If you get off the bar to make money, then you've given up your life." I am constantly irritated by articles about "which majors make the most money". Money is useful and necessary, but if you hate your job and are stuck with it, money won't make you feel much better. <br></br>
My neighbor cleans houses for a living, and she frequently likes to regale me with stories of her very rich clients. Most of them are slobs, and won't even clean up when the dog pisses on their bathroom floor, because "the cleaning lady will take care of that". These are people who buy all kinds of insanely expensive things and then carelessly leave them to be destroyed, or who invest in massive personal training, botox, and other things to make them appear younger, "because no one wants to look at an older woman in business." It's all about image and having things, and it reaches a maddening level of absurdity, and a complete alienation from others. If you get everything you want and can't figure out how to do a single thing for yourself, how do you get on in the real world with real people? How do you have any compassion for those who don't have enough? If the only interest is in the external, what happens to the internal? Maybe it's just me, but this sounds like a pretty horrid existence. There doesn't seem to be much meaning in a life that is just about appearing a certain way for others, and the constant acquisition of "stuff". <br></br>
On the other hand, the idea of "purpose" or "meaning" is a curious one. What is the purpose of life? We all do things to give our lives meaning, but does it have a cosmic importance? Joseph Campbell once asked, "What is the meaning of a flower? What is the meaning of a flea?" Life is not so much about "purpose" as it is about having an experience of being alive. Alan Watts spoke about a Japanese Zen master who spoke before an audience in New York. He said, "The first thing about Zen is that life has no purpose. If you drop a fart, you drop a fart. You do not say, 'At 9:00 I am going to drop a fart.' It just happens to you." (Naturally his pious Western audience struggled not to laugh at this.) <br></br>
I think we fill ourselves with the idea of "purpose" because we like to attach some importance to what we do. Humans are storytellers by nature, and we are always weaving a narrative. If we don't weave our own narrative, we get interested in someone else's narrative, or a fictional narrative. There is nothing wrong with creating our own narratives. But it's a bit like the writer who forces themselves to write something they think will sell, or will impress people--it usually falls flat in the end. The best narratives are spontaneous, and arise out of an unfettered imagination. This is the importance of play. When we live our lives according to what we're passionate about, it takes away the idea of "work". I remember our former Religion department chairman where I work telling me that he got his Ph.D., came to work at the university "and never worked a day in my life since." His work was so enjoyable, it ceased to be work. This is why I'm willing to work full-time AND teach part-time while working on my own doctorate--I'm passionate about all of it, so it's not really "work". (OK, maybe some of it is. But not most of it.) <br></br>
As I'm writing this my cat, Mr. Shiva, has selected a toy from his box and has dropped it at my feet, wanting me to throw it. I throw it for him and he dutifully brings it back once, and then leaves it the second time. But he comes running back and rubs against my leg, happy that I have stopped doing this "serious" thing long enough to play with him. We don't give animals enough credit for their intelligence. Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-79777008978135248652014-05-31T10:29:00.003-04:002014-05-31T10:34:39.554-04:00The Other Side of the HedgeLately it would not be Saturday if I was not changing bedsheets, sorting laundry, cleaning the upstairs rooms, and listening to Alan Watts on YouTube. I've heard most of his lectures, but the one today wasn't quite familiar. It had been previously billed as something like "Sense and Nonsense", but was given the title "Coincidence of Opposites" on YouTube. If you're interested, you can listen to it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE4HwaGhGmo">here</a>.<br></br>
One of the things Watts addresses in this lecture is the Hindu notion of <i>lila</i>, or "play". The lecture is about "purpose", as we all are greatly concerned with our "purpose" in life and if we're fulfilling it. He ponders the meaning of "purpose", and indeed it is a very Christian idea to the modern world, coming from the notion of the "purpose of God". The idea of a Divine Plan is used to keep order in a worldview that assumes that life is good. When evil occurs, we feel it must be the mysterious part of a "Divine Plan" that we don't understand. And of course some are suspicious that the Divine is not necessarily so good, or perhaps that it doesn't exist at all. But all of this is part of our search for meaning, whether from a "divine" perspective or not.<br></br>
The notion of divine "lila" is both baffling and makes complete sense at the same time. In the Hindu cosmology, the queen of the Three Worlds is Sri Lalita Devi, and the root of her name implies "lila" or "play". The Three Worlds are the Heavens, the Earth, and the Hells. If you read stories of the Hindu gods, they are strange to a Westerner. Why would Shiva grant a boon to a demon? Why would a demon try to engage in strict religious practices? The interactions between the gods and demons (devas and asuras) is bizarre from an ethical standpoint. We are so used to the idea of doing good and avoiding evil, that we miss the point entirely. The entire set of mythological interactions in Hinduism could easily be metaphors for the kinds of psychological conflicts and conundrums that we frequently face as we go through life. It is almost never a flat choice between what is "good" and what is "evil"--life is much more complex than that. It is more like the strategy of a game--we play until someone wins a round, and then we start over again. But it is the process of playing that (should be) enjoyable. Sometimes, as it would be in physical sports, the game can be painful. But it is the process, negotiating what comes next, that makes games and play akin to life. Children learn life skills from playing and creating imaginary worlds; it is not a "waste of time." They also learn to bring new ideas and things into the world; play generates creativity. <br></br>
Life in and of itself is a baffling paradox from the ethical point of view. What kind of system requires death to have life? You participate in killing every day, when you eat. Even if you are a vegetarian, you have to kill plants to eat. You may not do this killing yourself, but it is required somewhere along the line. Western myth handles this by declaring the whole process evil, even while (ironically) they are great "defenders of life". If they didn't see the process as evil, there would be no need for a "savior" to save you from the world. To view the world as corrupt, and humans as dominant over nature, has created a deep mythological problem. Many scratch their heads at climate change denial, but if you realize how this myth about nature is deeply embedded, at least since the 7th or 6th century B.C., it would make sense. Mythological thinking is entirely unconscious--we don't consciously think in terms of the myth, but the effects are there.<br></br>
This entire prelude is relevant to one of the stories I've read this week, "The Other Side of the Hedge", by E.M. Forester. The story is told in the first person, and the narrator is running a race along a dry dirt road. He stops because he is tired, and the people he knows keep encouraging him to keep running. But he lays down by a hedge, and wonders what is on the other side. With some effort, he manages to get through the hedge, and promptly falls into a moat. He hears someone laughing at him, and it turns out to be an old man, who pulls him out of the moat. The narrator is increasingly disturbed by this place, where everyone is at leisure and has nowhere to go. The place is beautiful, and he is told that this is the place "where mankind really belongs". But he wants no part of it--he wants to get back onto the road and keep running, even though the road looks desolate and lifeless from the view on the other side of the hedge.<br></br>
This story is very mythological. Falling into the water and being pulled out by an old man (the Jungian Senex archetype) represents a sort of rebirth into Wisdom. The Wisdom is ultimately rejected in this story, as Forester is trying to show us how we bring much of our suffering, our need to "achieve" something, do the "next" thing, is brought on by ourselves. That race is a game we participate in willingly. But often it is a chore, and we question our suffering. We could view life as it is from the other side of the hedge--a great play with no particular place to go, something simply to be enjoyed in the moment.<br></br>
Watts points out in his lecture that this notion of the world as play is in the Hebrew Old Testament, in descriptions of holy Wisdom ("Sophia" in the Greek), who was present at the creation of the world, and delighted in God's creation--and expresses in several books (Proverbs, Wisdom, Sirach) the idea that those who remember "wisdom" will have happy lives. Forester is suggesting that there is a wisdom in NOT running the race, there is an abundance in staying in the moment, and not trying to go anywhere or do anything "important". This is conveyed not only in the Biblical verses, but is the basis of Eastern doctrine. Buddhist meditation is very much about being in the "present". If one lives in the present and operates from the center of their being (the archetype of the Self, which is a quiet space), then life is not quite so serious. The "race" is put into context. The game is a very good metaphor, as we can get caught up in the idea of winning and competing, rather than in just playing to enjoy ourselves.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-17974372809021002842014-01-26T09:32:00.003-05:002014-01-26T09:32:55.050-05:00The Looking GlassThis winter has been difficult. For me, it seems that January is the cruelest month. I guess if I was to be fair, it's not been a total disaster, and probably better on the whole than last January. Some good things did happen--I got a second teaching job, furnace issues may have been finally sorted out, and even our big snows this month have been light and powdery--no heavy shoveling. But it has been so cold--unnaturally cold for us. My sister tells me that this was like winters she remembers as a child in the 1960s--subzero temperatures, lots of snow. <br></br>
I feel like a shut-in, and the cold and snow makes Spring seem very far away. Some nights I am unable to sleep; I have many irrational fears about the furnace going out, or the power going out. Both things have happened, so maybe it's not totally irrational. I would just like for the extreme cold to go away, and stop draining our resources. I know that places like Canada deal with this kind of cold routinely, but I also think that they are better equipped to deal with it. Just as states like Florida have heat pumps as a regular feature in their homes to save on cooling costs, I'm sure that those in colder climates have found a way to efficiently heat their homes without heavy reliance on tenuous resources. <br></br>
So, this is one of many mornings where I am up, maybe not so early, with wool blankets tacked over both doors to the outside to help keep the cold out, a cup of hot green tea, and a vague sense of being overwhelmed by everything I have to do. The cat crawls under a blanket on the sofa and snores. I wish I could do that so easily.<br></br>
I received word last night that my mother's sister died, succumbing to lung cancer. It seems very natural in this winter setting; death is everywhere. Yet with the death is a hope of release from suffering. I am mostly sad for my mother and her other sister, as well as my uncle, and my cousin's family. In some cases with those mentioned there was a great reliance on my aunt, and the transition to life without her is going to be difficult. Years ago her first husband died, also of lung cancer--it was at least 30 years ago. Shortly after his death one of my sisters, and possibly my brother, saw him walking down the street in my parents' neighborhood. My sister called out to him questioningly, and he just looked at her and smiled, and walked off. They didn't see him again. After reading <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2545668/Is-proof-near-death-experiences-ARE-real-Extraordinary-new-book-intensive-care-nurse-reveals-dramatic-evidence-says-banish-fear-dying.html">this recent article on NDE's</a>, it made me wonder if my uncle, or whatever remains of his personality, met my aunt when she passed. I guess we'll never know. <br></br>
In my insomniac moments, I like to read. One of the stories I read in the last couple of days was Walter De La Mare's "The Looking Glass". The story centers around Alice, a sickly girl who has a persistent cough. Much is made of the line between freedom and imprisonment; she likes to visit the garden outside her house in the afternoons. She is free of those around her, and yet that freedom of being alone in nature made her a little frightened. A local old woman, described as "slovenly ponderous" and "arrogant" seems to know that Alice will be visiting the garden at this time, and always manages to be there. Alice doesn't like the woman, who is called Sarah, but her sense of aloneness there makes her welcome Sarah's appearances. <br></br>
Sarah, who is an archetypal witch figure in this story, spins her "lore" about the haunted garden. At first she says "the house", and rather sharply corrects Sarah when she says the house is haunted--she MEANT the garden. The implication is that if Alice comes dressed as a bride on May Day, she will have a vision of the garden's secrets, and what is implied is that she will see a young man, a lover-figure. Alice questions Sarah endlessly about this, until Sarah is weary. Alice notices, as Sarah seems to, that the garden shimmers "like a looking glass". There is a certain clarity of the "other side". However, Sarah does not seem to be enamored of the garden; she talks about taking out the birds with a blunderbuss, and when pressed about what is "on the other side" (because Sarah has surely seen it), she says it is nothing but "death". <br></br>
Alice makes her way back, and makes the telling statement that it is she herself that haunts the garden. She makes preparations for the May Day ritual, and is anxious for it. Ultimately, however, she does not go through with it, and in the end she is "done with looking glasses" and spends her time worrying about the practical domestic things of life. <br></br>
Archetypally, this story is loaded with meaning. The secret, imaginative world of childhood, where fairies and Santa Claus are real, is replaced by adolescence, where we fall into the dreamy world of the anima or animus. An interest in boys or girls replaces childhood play, though that sense of the "other" world hasn't entirely gone away. Then we become adults, and it all falls away. Between education, heartbreak, and issues of survival, we step into a life that was not what we would have expected in our dreams. So, we settle into our routines, get jobs, pay bills, become "practical", and forget about the "nonsense" of childhood. In short, we trade one illusion for another. <br></br>
"The Looking Glass" mentioned in the story is what shows us the other side of our consciousness--the seemingly unreal world of the Collective. We have direct access to this as children. I remember watching the documentary "My Amityville Horror" about Danny Lutz, one of the children in the house at the time of its demonic activity. He told his story, and at the end, the filmmaker brought in a psychologist who basically wrote him off as being in a "childhood fantasy". I was very angry that the filmmaker did that. Danny's childhood experience and his account of it is more real than the gibberings of some idiot psychologist. The psychologist no longer has access; the psychologist doesn't know. Danny was reluctant to tell his story for that very reason. <br></br>
In a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRjatXe5bis">documentary on the belief in fairies in Iceland</a>, a police officer tells the filmmakers about his childhood. He walks among rocks, and says that they had doors that opened when he was a child, and he would play with the elves that came out. Then he said what was translated as "my testicles came down" (i.e., he entered puberty) and "the doors were closed and I never saw them again." <br></br>
I have often thought about what that means. Jung has said that imagination is a fact; everything we have, all our technologies, had to come from someone's imagination. We are a race of storytellers, and stories shape our lives. Illusions shape our lives. The illusion we create for ourselves as adults is called "business" and "economy". Now, it does take a certain amount of cooperation and work to make a society "go round". But our systems are artificial. We have rocks and paper that are assigned a value, and we spend our adult lives trying to accumulate those pieces of paper. They only stand for wealth; they are not really anything. As Alan Watts pointed out, money is no more wealth than the words on a menu are food. But this is an illusion that we all participate in, and it is so accepted by society that it is "real". It is the game adults play, and a difficult one to not participate in. <br></br>
When illusions vaporize or are shattered, we become "disillusioned". As a result, we cease to trust ourselves. As children, we were magical; as adults, we cannot believe that we can control our destinies. It just seems "illogical". We have been taught that the rational mind is the only reliable thing--never trust your inner self, your gut feelings and intuitions. This is not really helped by a mythical view that says we are all machines, or like machines. <br></br>
This is why people hang onto religions, and onto so-called "irrational beliefs"--the paranormal, supernatural, etc. We question that imaginative reality all the time, but we don't question the one we accept as "real". The "reality" is that one is not necessarily more "real" than the other. The Hindus have a concept called "maya"--illusion, and they say that this is what the visible world is--the real world is that of undifferentiated consciousness. You can choose to distrust everything as a result, but I have always hoped that this means that I can write my own illusory story instead of accepting everyone else's. If I don't like the picture, I want to be able to paint another one. <br></br>
That might sound crazy, but once again I think of Iceland. When their economy collapsed due to bad banking practices, they threw the bankers in jail and forgave loans. <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-26/is-remedy-for-next-crisis-buried-in-iceland-view-correct-.html">Their recovery has been remarkable</a>. Thinking differently about our illusions might not be so "crazy" after all.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-45975668260853582832014-01-02T08:20:00.000-05:002014-01-02T08:54:45.219-05:00CutOn my long holiday vacation that has now been extended due to snow, I've been cleaning out a lot of files to make room for more research material. In the process, I handle a lot of paper. On pulling out one stack, I gave myself a paper cut, and my first instinct was to put my bloodied finger in my mouth. I realized that in our germophobic society, I would have been advised against doing such a thing; after all, the mouth is so disgusting with germs, even a dog's mouth is cleaner. <br></br>
I then started thinking about all the "gross" things that kids do (or did)--eating mud pies, picking their noses and eating it, handing all manners of creepy things out in nature, and sometimes putting those in their mouth as well. Little babies, while going through their "oral" phase, will put anything in their mouth, including things that have just been in the toilet or have come out of the dog or cat's dish. I can almost see you shuddering as you read this. <br></br>
However, it also occurred to me that kids who did all these "gross" things are probably healthier than the kid who didn't. When you encounter germs and bacteria, you are better able to naturally adjust your immune system to their presence. Kids get all kinds of weird diseases because they are building up their immune systems, and their exposure to other children and to Nature allows them to do this. All those disgusting things are probably going to guarantee that you live longer. <br></br>
This is not to say that people shouldn't be hygienic. Of course you should wash your hands after using the bathroom, you should bathe and change your clothes every day. If you get a cut, you should probably treat it with iodine. If you are in a hospital environment, you should take even more precautions. It is interesting how in hospitals the greatest risk is of secondary infection, not the thing a person came in to the hospital for originally. Secondary infections are nasty--MRSA and other staph-like infections abound in such sterile environments. Basic hygiene helps you avoid these things. <br></br>
But we live in society that is beyond basic hygiene. We have "antibacterial" everything, we take ourselves (and our kids if we have them) to the doctor at the slightest sign of a cold and demand antibiotics. Colds don't respond to antibiotics--they're viral, not bacterial. But I often hear that people take antibiotics anyway, "just in case". And they wonder why they are always sick, and so are their kids. Antibiotics are sometimes necessary, but often doctors will prescribe very high-powered antibiotics for illnesses that would do just fine with good old amoxicillin. If I get an upper respiratory infection that is actually bacterial, I always request amoxicillin. I don't need Bactrim or Cipro. <br></br>
Our uber antibacterial culture is a reflection of our psychological culture. I see a lot in schools these days about anti-bullying policies. When I read accounts of bullying, I'm not sure if some of them are exaggerated, but I'm surprised 1. at how much more aggressive bullying has become when it happens, and 2. how fragile children are when dealing with it. I hear a lot more about suicides from bullying. Maybe it's just the Internet and an increase in information; maybe things like this have always happened. But I've started to see a trend in both physical and psychological health that might be summed up this way: When you fight against life and nature, it will fight back aggressively. <br></br>
Many of you probably experienced some form of bullying growing up. I know I did. I put up with two years of intense bullying before I switched schools. No one enjoys being bullied, no one likes to hear about it happening to kids, and no parent wants to see their kid go through it. But a certain amount of bullying, especially in adolescence, is normal. Children are naturally defiant, and testing their boundaries. They are in the painful process of becoming adults. Lacking any kind of real transformational rituals, they are only transformed by traipsing off in the woods by themselves, or making a wrong turn in a dark alley and meeting a gang of hostile teenagers. If we don't come into conflict or face danger, we never learn to deal with it. You don't grow as a person or as a citizen of your society if you are sheltered from everything. This is why the very rich can't understand the poor. If you've never struggled to make ends meet, it is very easy for you to say that those requiring assistance are just "freeloaders". Of course, I have known people who have struggled in this life, and say, "why should they get assistance if I worked hard?" Both points of view suffer from the delusion that everyone else is "just like us", has the same opportunities and the same challenges. It didn't happen to me, why should it happen to you? <br></br>
In ancient tribal societies, a young boy was often forcefully taken from his mother at a young age, and put through vicious initiations and scarification rituals, to make him one of the "men" of the tribe. We don't do things like that in "conscious" civilizations. (I tend to think of tribal cultures as "pre-conscious", because they are so immersed in nature, there is no split in their psychology. That said, there isn't rational consciousness like ours, either.) But that external adolescence ritual now takes place in the atmosphere of junior high school cliques and bullies. And it is vicious, because the process of growing up is vicious, both psychologically and physiologically. <br></br>
Both parents and schools have become protective of kids to the point that most kids today don't have normal growing-up experiences. Everything is pre-scheduled and arranged. They have their own stresses, but they are different. They are not really free to be themselves. Which is why I often get students in college who really can't be bothered with things like class attendance, proper formatting, deadlines, and such. For some of them, the rebellion process is beginning at 18 rather than at 11 or 12. <br></br>
Occasionally we see backlashes against movies that depict violence or death to children, and there has even been a questioning of reading fairy tales to children. Sometimes the objection to fairy tales is that they are frightening; other times, it is because they encourage "irrationality" in children, and belief in monsters. This is because we are so cut off from our inner life, we really believe that it doesn't exist. We are told that we are only rational machines. But that doesn't change the fact that the inner life is there. In Bruno Bettelheim's classic work on fairy tales and psychology, he says the following: <br></br>
<i>In order to master the psychological problems of growing up--overcoming narcissistic disappointments, oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries; becoming able to relinquish childhood dependencies; gaining a feeling of selfhood and of self-worth, and a sense of moral obligation--a child needs to understand what is going on within his conscious self so that he can also cope with that which goes on in his unconscious. He can achieve this understanding, and with it the ability to cope, not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of his unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it by spinning out daydreams--ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures. ... It is here that fairy tales have unequaled value, because they offer new dimensions to the child's imagination which would be impossible for him to discover as truly on his own. </i>(Bruno Bettelheim. <i>The Uses of Enchantment</i>. Vintage Books, 1989: 6-7). <br></br>
Social media doesn't really help. I am an avid Facebook user, I admit. But often, online relationships take the place of real ones. We text rather than have phone conversations. This is not all bad; if I just need to ask you what time you're coming to visit, I don't need to get into a conversation, I just need a text confirmation. When friends and family are far away and busy with their lives, this may be the only viable way to keep in touch. However, there is the other extreme as well. I hear about families where the kid is sitting in his room, and texts his mother in the kitchen two doors down about what's for dinner. Having taught both online and in-person, I was rather surprised to find that my online students were more interactive than my in-person ones. If I ask a question in a regular classroom, I often get an uncomfortable silence. Online, some brave soul will speak up. He or she is not facing their peers, so it is easier to interact. But if all of our conversations are electronic ones, we don't become fully human. You can't be fully human until you interact with humans, and have some empathy for them. You haven't lived life if you haven't been hurt and traumatized. You don't learn if you don't make mistakes. It's part of the package deal, and is not something to be eliminated. When learning to walk, we frequently fall down. Should we give up after the first time we fall? <br></br>
I am a fan of Jungian psychology because Carl Jung is the one who pointed out this polarity in our consciousness. If you are good, you are also evil. If you are happy, you are also capable of being depressed. If you can love, you can also hate. And if you encounter God, you will also encounter the Devil. This is his concept of the "Shadow"--the part of ourselves that is weaker, and that we'd rather pretend we didn't have. In our "good vs. evil" society, we seem to feel we must eliminate one, and the other must triumph. But we don't "choose" one over the other. We need to integrate all of these factors and experiences into our lives, because that's what life IS. This is what the Genesis creation story is actually about. Eve HAD to eat the forbidden fruit in order for life to happen. Adam and Eve should not have remained in the garden for all eternity. Being one with God may be wonderful, but it's not conscious living. Once the fruit was eaten, they came into the field of time, which is the field of opposites--dark and light, good and bad, male and female, etc., etc. They noticed difference. And they now experience suffering, because being in the temporal world IS suffering. Life is like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are ripped apart, and regain their meaning as they are put back together. Our lives are about putting the pieces together--our opposites. But it's the process of figuring out and putting together that is important; the journey and not the destination. For better or for worse, we need to suffer, we need to encounter others, take risks, and occasionally fail. Otherwise, we are nothing but the walking dead; or, as Joseph Campbell said, we may be living someone else's life, not our own. "Perfect" means "finished"--we are not finished. The only way to move towards being finished is to experience ALL facets of life, not just the ones we prefer. You can't sanitize yourself against life.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-36266780966861331262013-11-27T12:14:00.000-05:002013-11-27T12:14:53.595-05:00ShardsI have finished my doctoral class for this semester as of yesterday. It was a cold, rainy night and a tense ride home in darkness, fog, and traffic. I am now commencing five days off before I deal with the home stretch of Fall semester for my students, and my day job.<br></br>
Though today is a relatively warm 50 degrees, one should not be fooled; winter is certainly coming. The trees are largely bare, and the grass is beginning to take on a straw-like hue. This week I lost another friend and colleague to a brain tumor, and this has made me start thinking about death.<br></br>
Death is not an evil, in spite of our dread of it. Physical human death never comes at a good time; whether the person is 20 or 90, we are never quite ready to say goodbye. It occurs to me that death is viewed differently by the dying person and the survivors. Some people are terrified of death, especially if they feel they have more work ahead of them, more life to live. Others welcome it as a relief from what has become a life of suffering. Many who have near-death experiences don't want to come back to life. If their evidence means anything, death isn't something so terrible. <br></br>
It is a different matter for survivors. The intensity of feeling about the death will depend on how close you are to the person, how much it directly touches your life. We can read the obituaries every day and never blink an eye. We don't know many of these people. For the families and friends, there is a void. If the dead person wasn't liked, or if someone had to spend many years taking care of the dying person, the death may come as a relief. Yet, even in such cases, there are the unresolved conflicts, questions that are not answered. <br></br>
Death can also refer to loss and change, and is absolutely critical to living a full life, paradoxically. If we are always stuck in the same place, then we never grow as human beings. If we are not made uncomfortable, if we do not have our assumptions shattered, or hit "rock bottom" on a destructive streak, we may never stop to look at the bigger picture. In the class I just finished, we read Philoctetes, a play by Sophocles. Philoctetes was a favorite of Heracles, and after Heracles' death, Philoctetes retained his bow and poison arrows. Philoctetes was needed by the Greeks (Acheans) to win the Trojan War. But when he (in one version) accidentally tread in a sacred place, he was bit by a viper, which left him with a festering leg wound that gave off such an awful stench, Odysseus and his crew voted to leave Philoctetes on an island by himself. Later they come with Neoptolemus (or Diomedes, in some versions) to try to convince Philoctetes to return with them. What ensues is Philoctetes cursing them, saying he will never submit because of what they did by leaving him. On the other hand, when they turn to leave, he continually says, "Don't go!" He is at a death point, but it is not a physical death--he does live, and is healed of his wound after leaving. Philoctetes is stuck in his victim status. He was genuinely wronged, there is no doubt. But when the opportunity comes for positive change, he pouts and would rather nurse his wounds and his pride. The impasse is broken by a deus ex machina--the spirit of Heracles, now a god, appears to him and tells him it is his destiny to go. But this is not a cop-out device on Sophocles' part. Heracles is the better part of Philoctetes--his inner strength and heroic qualities. These have been hidden by his psychological wound, which makes him prefer to stay a wronged victim than risk changing his life.<br></br>
I see this as a good example of the Hegelian dialectic--Philoctetes is in state A, the Greeks come and present opposing state B, and Heracles represents the synthesis--he is still a victim, but he chooses to take the risk. When someone is stuck in bitterness, depression, or despair it is important that they are ready to make the change. Often we look at others in these states and encourage them to "move on and get over it." But the timing has to be right; otherwise, no real change occurs. <br></br>
We might say, "But the change would be for the better! Only a whiner or someone with a persecution complex would choose to stay in the state of suffering." Not true. Most of us like change less than we admit. This is why even happy occasions, like buying a new house, moving in or marrying a partner, or getting a new job with more money can cause anxiety. The potential for something better is there--but what if it isn't better? You can't go back to where you were. It's a case of "the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know."<br></br>
I am probably as guilty of this as anyone. I do believe in the power of the unconscious, because it never fails to let me know when I'm getting "stuck", or the tell me the truth of a lost situation. Naturally the message is symbolic--we all know that dreams are strange. But the message still shines through. <br></br>
Sometimes the message is direct. My friends and colleagues knew that my marriage to my husband was really "over" for years, and I really should have left. But when they said this to me, I wasn't ready to do it. I wasn't happy where I was, but I felt there were too many financial risks at the time. I was attached to certain things about my life that I wasn't sure I could give up. But when the time was right, after we'd gotten rid of most of our debt load, I remember waking up from a dream, and hearing a sentence in my head: "Now it is time to get divorced." I got up, made some tea, and sat on my porch contemplating this statement. It gave me some anxiety, but I realized that I had a golden opportunity. I did the math, and figured out that I could get a place of my own on my salary, even though money would be tight. So, I took the plunge and never regretted it.<br></br>
In other cases, there is a dream to be interpreted, and sometimes it does nothing but present the conundrum. In my last serious relationship post-divorce, I had a dream where I had a number of people in my house. These were mostly women, and some of them were people I didn't personally care for--they represented negative aspects of personality (like perpetual victimhood). At one point, they told me that all the rooms were taken and I would have to leave. I started feeling anxious, wondering where I could possibly go? But then I remembered that this was MY house, and they were merely tenants. So, I told all of them to leave. I woke up with the phrase in my head, "Take back your house." I had allowed the other person in my relationship to compromise who I was, as well as social expectations, and this was a violation of my own Self. We broke up within days of this dream.<br></br>
The final example involves John Foxx. While I was still traveling to see his shows, I remember having a dream of him fairly early on. I was in a classroom, and a woman was lecturing on something. He walked right in, and stood in front of me, looking at me. Naturally everyone including the teacher noticed, and most people seemed amused. It was clearly a disruption of the class, so I got up and went out the door with him, to find out what he wanted. As soon as we stepped out of the room, he quickly walked away. In the second significant dream, we were in a large office building, and I believe we both worked there--I seem to recall being a temporary employee, he was more permanent. He would stop me to sit down, and would start to tell me things--things I'd been wanting to know--but he'd get one sentence out, then say, "Oh, excuse me for a minute, I just have to take care of this." Then he'd be off, following a delivery person to take some of what they were bringing for himself, and stashing it away. Again, people were amused by it. This went on for some time, until I got annoyed. He kept telling me to wait, that he was going to finish his thought, but I spent more time waiting, and it seemed unlikely he would resume the conversation. I had noticed that there was an office door with my brother's name on it. (My brother has been dead since 1989.) I told him, "If you want to talk to me, I'll be in my brother's office." He said, "What do you mean, your brother's office?" So, I explained it to him. Later he did come down, and said, "You know, I'm very busy, I don't really have time for this." I replied, "Yes, I know--you're busy spending a lot of time taking things that should be shared with others and keeping them for yourself." I remember that he sort of smirked in his usual way, and that was the end of the dream. The two dreams are related, and the meaning became quite clear to me. The last dream coincided with my last email from him, and thus signaled the end of our friendship. <br></br>
All of these represent deaths of different kinds--loss of people, beliefs, habits. Often it is for the best, ultimately. Sometimes we waste too much of ourselves on people and situations that leave us stuck. But I think that loss is as much a shattering as it is a void. Something explodes, and despite our best efforts, we don't clean up all the shards. Things reappear--associations we have with people and situations. And we want to be done, we do not want to return to the past. But there may be some fragment of the death, paraphrasing Monty Python, that is "not dead yet". It may not be about the individual or external situation; it is more likely about an internal conflict or belief that we are reluctant to relinquish. When people follow prophets in religious cults who turn out to be false, the belief doesn't go away; it is rationalized into something else. Some battles are too big for us to take on at the time of the death, because more than the external situation is at stake; rationality is no help. They need time and a new opportunity. This is why people speak of "karma" that repeats itself. We did not see then; we might see now.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-17789544255018174582013-11-23T10:03:00.001-05:002013-11-23T10:03:10.344-05:00SpiderWow, I haven't blogged in a long time. It's been a long semester of doctoral work, managing classes, managing my full-time job, and trying to keep up with life in general. Now that things are slowing down for at least a week, I have some time to get back to writing. I hope I can get back into a regular blogging groove, but I can't make promises at the moment. Just check in once in awhile to see what's new if you follow!<br></br>
What's new with me--I'm working on a chapter for a book project called "Little Horrors", about the notion of children as "monsters" in our modern society, rather than as the paradigm of innocence. When this moves forward and becomes available I will provide an update.<br></br>
I'm also working on a presentation for the "Supernatural and Folkore in Tradition" conference in the Shetland Islands, March 2014. My talk is about the Jungian Trickster archetype with respect to the traditional "poltergeist". It should be an interesting conference, and my first time seeing the Shetlands. Of course, I still have to pay off the conference, and money is tight now that I'm paying for graduate school AND another car (my 2003 Toyota finally bit the dust in July). To that end, I am selling just about all of my Edward Gorey valuables--you can find them on eBay. First editions, signed copies, all of it. I'm sad to see it go, but it's not doing much on the shelf in my bedroom, either.<br></br>
So, back to business:<br></br>
I woke up early this morning to feed Mr. Shiva. It is Saturday, so I have no will to get up and stay up at 4AM. As I was heading back to bed, I noticed a yellow spider on the wall near the light switch. Spiders always seem to breed in old country houses, and this was one of many varieties that suddenly appears out of nowhere. The random appearance of living creepy-crawlies makes it easy to imagine where the notion of "spontaneous generation" came from among ancient philosophers. <br></br>
I found myself thinking, "What is the meaning of a spider?" Joseph Campbell immediately came to mind, when Bill Moyers asked him about the "meaning" of life. He responded, "What is the meaning of a flower? What is the meaning of a flea?" It doesn't have a "meaning"--it just "is".<br></br>
Yet, if I think about how this question is pursued, someone would suggest that the purpose of a spider is to keep certain bug populations down, to create a balance in the ecosystem. Some spiders protect plants and are good for gardens. I'm sure we could think of a "reason" for poisonous spiders as well. What occurred to me about this is that we tend to think of things in terms of function. You get a college degree that is "useful", not something that will waste your time "navel-gazing". Everything is about "return on investment". What are you, as a citizen, contributing to society? Are you useful? What happens when you're not useful anymore? Once something--or someone--ceases to provide a function or service, they are discarded.<br></br>
It seems clear to me that this is an outgrowth of a cultural myth/metaphor that compares man, and life, to a machine. This is a metaphor that's been around at least since the Industrial Revolution. In a corporate or factory environment, one is thought of as a "cog" in the wheel that drives the turbine. Many of our science fiction television programs and movies include the idea of androids or robots, we talk about artificial intelligence and its uses, and in our high-tech world there are talks of brain implants and other chips that previously would have been the domain of the crazy conspiracy theorist. <br></br>
But let's talk about the crazy conspiracy guy for a second. Why is that such a common theme with those suffering with some variety of paranoid schizophrenic illness? Why not, say, goblins spying on them, or succubi draining them of their life, their thoughts? I would suggest it is because (as Jung suggests) the schizoid is in touch, maybe even lost, in the collective. And this notion of the human machine is deeply embedded in our modern collective psyche. <br></br>
Another common notion that I've mentioned before is the zombie metaphor. We have a thing about zombies in movies and on television. Our zombies are somewhat believable in the sense that they are usually individuals infected with a virus that turns them into mindless undead devouring creatures. <br></br>
So, what do zombies, androids, robots, and chip-implanted cyborg humans have in common? They act automatically, without real consciousness or thought. They just do what they do, whether "useful" or destructive (or both). I think the dominance of these metaphors has come out of our reaction to Descartes' famous "cogito ergo sum". When you say, "I think, therefore I am," consciousness is about, in the words of my current professor, "what's from the neck up." We have identified consciousness with the mind, which we associate with the brain. Modern neuroscience and neuropsychiatry works on the hypothesis that our consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain. The focus is always on motor functions, memory, and reason. Why? Because these are the "useful" things. There is some research into emotions, but these are seen more as an embarrassing byproduct. <br></br>
In short--our whole scientific conception of life is that of a machine, or perhaps a zombie. We have been instilled with the belief that we are no more than (in Lewis Black's phrasing) "meat with eyes". If you go back to what I've said about life having to sustain itself through death, and feeding on itself, it's not hard to see how the zombie reflects the terror that we may be just mindless devouring sacks of flesh.<br></br>
It is also reflected in our social attitudes. Those who have the most money, according to another cultural belief, work the hardest. The poor, the elderly, and disabled aren't "useful"--they are a burden on the system. Indeed, for all of the pro-life rhetoric, most pro-life politicians would put children in this category as well. They are a burden on the system, they require education and health care and food and shelter, and they can't provide these things for themselves. To be "meaningful" is to have money, and it is assumed that the monied are also the "productive". The monied are not necessarily productive; they are often just clever manipulators, or were born into having it. It's a case of Odysseus winning Achilles' armor over Ajax in the Iliad; Ajax believes Odysseus doesn't deserve it, because he is a manipulator rather than a real warrior in his eyes. But the very notion of manipulation doesn't work in a man/machine scheme--that requires a certain kind of intelligence not measured by motor skills, though perhaps by reason to a certain degree. So, we tend to think of those folks as "productive" or at least being reasonable enough to be successful in the system. (This only works if the manipulator has money--if they are poor and do this, they are cheaters who should be jailed immediately.) <br></br>
This is the extreme absurdity of assuming that "meaning" has to do with "function". It is understandable that for a society to work, everyone needs to contribute. But we're not machines. Spirituality suggests that societies work best when everyone shares, and treats everyone else with equal respect. This is why "good works" are often foundational, even in churches that believe in predestination. The difference is the truly human one--if you respect someone else, if you have empathy and compassion for their situation, you are moved to help. If you are angry and going to strike someone, your sense of self-reflection and conscience makes you stop and think before you act. A machine does not do this. A machine just charges ahead mindlessly with whatever task they are programmed to do. Anything outside of that causes a malfunction.<br></br>
We start to lose our humanity when we are too "driven" by ambition of any kind. That single-mindedness makes us forget others. I was floored when a good friend of mine, who had relentlessly pursued the same goal for years, suddenly stopped. Her whole manner was different--she was more relaxed, she could think clearly, she was concerned about those around her. Before that, she would charge right past someone speaking to her, totally unaware of their presence, because she was so lost in her own focus on the "goal". This happens a lot to people; probably all of us have been guilty of it at one time or another. Some crisis is usually what brings about the change, and hopefully the healing.<br></br>
So, back to our spider. I don't know the meaning of a spider. The spider just "is", like everything else. Understanding the world is not about "how", it is not utilitarian. It is practical and useful to know "how"--science is important in this regard. But it does not corner the market on the truth of all existence. Knowing that the blue sky is caused by light refraction doesn't make the blue sky any less beautiful or mysterious. It doesn't make this whole lot any less mysterious. And that is the real role of myth and religion--to experience and negotiate the wonder of existence, both positive and negative. Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-76509201049987426862013-08-23T19:38:00.000-04:002013-08-23T19:38:12.693-04:00The Lottery (Shirley Jackson)On Thursday, I went to a session for Mythology instructors at the university where I teach. We discussed many procedural and technical things, but one thing that came up in several conversations was understanding that “myth” does not mean “untrue” or “fictional”. The assertion that “myth is making a comeback” usually gets the rejoinder, “it never really left”. Myth informs all of our beliefs, experiences, and interpretations of the world. It comes in many guises—propaganda, popular culture, stereotypes, and tradition, to name a few. If my students come away with nothing else, I want them to understand how they are often unconsciously affected by myth. If you are asked about a particular behavior or custom, and your response is, “that’s just how it is”, then you’re unconsciously playing out a mythical narrative.<br></br>
“The Lottery” is a classic story that puts tradition in our faces, and is metaphorical of the horrific consequences of blindly following tradition. Shirley Jackson has always been adept at the best kind of horror, the psychological thriller. The movie “The Haunting” is based on another of her short stories, “The Haunting of Hill House”. If you’ve never seen this movie, see the 1963 original rather than the 1999 remake. (The last time I saw this movie it was projected on the side of a mausoleum at Forgotten Hollywood Cemetery in Los Angeles, which was a weird experience.) One does not need scary-looking monsters, chainsaw killers, or zombies to be scared out of their wits. “The Haunting” leaves us unsure if the house is haunted, or if this is some kind of weird projection of the main character’s own neurotic condition. <br></br>
“The Lottery” begins normally enough, on a beautiful summer’s day, and the lottery is clearly a big event, but the ritualistic, traditional procedure for holding the lottery tells you that this is not the Pick-Six or the Powerball. The lottery is, for this town and many others, an ancient tradition. The names are put into a black box, and even that is venerated as a sacred object. It is falling apart, but it seems taboo to replace it. All families participate, and the heads of families draw from the box. <br></br>
There is talk while the drawing is going on of abolishing the lottery. Someone mentions that many towns have stopped doing it. But this idea is quickly put down—they are fools to give up the tradition—it can lead to no good. An early mention of the harvest in connection with the lottery gives it a sort of pagan feel, a la “The Wicker Man”. Much of the to-do during the drawing of lots is from Tessie Hutchinson, who feels that her husband did not have enough time to choose properly from the box. She must have had a premonition, because she was the lottery winner. The people promptly picked up rocks and stoned her to death, so that they could get home in time for lunch. <br></br>
This disturbing narrative is meant to show us the pitfalls of blindly following tradition. The ritual of stoning the woman to death is reminiscent of old “scapegoating” rituals, the basis of many human sacrifice rituals. The person is an offering to make the harvest fruitful, to take the collective blame for the sins of the citizenry. The fact that this takes place in a more modern time, with such nonchalance, should give us pause about the kinds of beliefs that we have that are harmful to others. When we treat a particular group as inferior because “that’s what the Bible says”, or “that’s the way God intended it”, or, “that’s just the way it’s always been”, it would be worthwhile to read this story, and reflect on it. While no one may be literally stoned to death (though some communities would advocate the death of those who are different), we can do harm to others by making stereotypical assumptions. Continued racial and gender conflicts in our society are sufficient evidence of this. <br></br>
The collective action of the community is also something that seems out of joint in the modern world, where the freedom of the individual is of the highest value. The development of ego-consciousness was a bastion against blood ritual—there was no need to protect the tribe from numinous forces. The individual identity fights this battle on its own, albeit in a pluralistic collective context. We have not stopped being one group of humans, but we do not all share a common belief, language, or purpose. Some aspects of our being are collective, but our societies are made up of individuals. Hence, the stoning of Tessie Hutchinson just seems senseless and barbaric. <br></br>
In one of my conversations on Thursday, we discussed why it is that people persist in beliefs that have been disestablished by facts. People don’t think rationally; they think mythically, and certain types of mythical thinking need to be balanced with rationality. One’s story is tied up with one’s identity, and simply stating facts is not enough to change the story. Individuals have to change their own stories, or find new ones that are more suited to contemporary society. As Jung said, it is only individuals who can change collective consciousness.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-44783763781487679552013-08-22T07:59:00.000-04:002013-08-22T07:59:25.963-04:00The Standard of Living (Dorothy Parker)Dorothy Parker had a way of saying things that was metaphorically clear, and like a slap in the face. Her brutal satire was a reflection of her personal unhappiness, and her expression was absolutely brilliant. Some of my favorite expressions from her include, “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice,” “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to,” and “I require three things in a man; he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.” <br></br>
“The Standard of Living” is a Parker short-story that focuses on two stenographers, Annabel and Midge. (Does anyone do stenography anymore?) Her description of their tea room lunch leaves one feeling ill: “Usually they ate sandwiches of spongy new white bread greased with butter and mayonnaise; they ate thick wedges of cake lying wet beneath ice cream and whipped cream and melted chocolate gritty with nuts.” It sounds almost pornographic, and incredibly unappetizing, like someone describing sex as it actually is, and not as it is in romance novels. <br></br>
The two girls are best friends, and are portrayed as an incredibly shallow couple of floozies. “They looked conspicuous, cheap, and charming.” The core of their friendship is around a game that involves deciding what they would buy if they inherited a million dollars, and couldn’t spend it on anything for anyone else. They had gotten into quarrels over speculative purchases. One day they are walking down Fifth Avenue, and decide to go into a high-class jewelry store and ask the price on an emerald necklace. They find out it is $250,000. They leave in a huff, and the two of them are now disjointed and discombobulated as they walk down the street. Annabel then proposes a new game, where the ante is upped from a million dollars to ten million dollars. <br></br>
The relationship of the girls is entirely material and superficial. There is no basis for the friendship except shopping, and coveting expensive clothes and jewelry. In her usual way, Parker cuts right to the heart of stereotypical female friendships; everything is about appearance and conspicuous consumption. There are no discussions of thoughts, feelings, or anything at all that relates to the world beyond that. The men in their lives are accessories; they are dating different ones every night, though Parker notes that “there really wasn’t much difference” in the different men. <br></br>
I reflected on the time period in which Parker was writing; this piece was published in the New Yorker in 1941. When I think about the prevalence of things like “charm schools” at that time, there is an implicit criticism of women as living dolls, to be dressed up and looked at. Like children, they are to be seen, and not heard, and should have nothing of any consequence to say. <br></br>
I could not imagine someone with Parker’s personality fitting into this milieu of women. I fully sympathize with her on this point, as I find myself with little to say to women (or men) who make exclusively superficial conversation. The equivalent, perhaps, is the man you meet in the bar who brags about his car and his stock portfolio. It says nothing, and means nothing. <br></br>
Most people seem to find Parker either hilarious or offensive, and I would suggest that she is a bit of both. Satire is a bittersweet medicine that is necessary for us to see the absurdity of the “normal”.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-86766019062448629672013-08-20T06:04:00.000-04:002013-08-20T06:04:02.140-04:00Ghosts (Lord Dunsany)There are many varieties of "ghost" story, and not all ghost stories are about ghosts. The reality of ghosts cannot be separated from psychology, as they are "psyche" phenomena regardless of any independent existence that they may or may not have.
I read Lord Dunsany (Edward Plunkett)'s story "Ghosts" last night, based purely on the title. Dunsany was part of the Abbey Theatre circle in Dublin, and was friends with many of the great literary figures of his time. He was related to Oliver Plunkett, the sainted Bishop of Armagh, and was friends with the likes of W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. The story is about a house in Oneleigh, where the narrator visits his brother and has a quarrel with him.
The house has all the traditional "haunted house" elements, with the howling winds outside, dark corners, and deathlike stillness in certain parts of the house. There is of course a "door that hasn't been opened", and "spiders watching by the deathbeds of yore". In short, the house is a troubled psyche, and the room is an entrance to the collective unconscious, where we encounter long-forgotten history.<br></br>
In this room, the narrator sees spirits, and near them dogs that represent their sins. The dogs take notice of him, and circle around him, and their influence preys on his weaknesses, and gives him the urge to kill his brother. So, now we are dealing with the Shadow--and the Shadow is always the first archetype encountered on such a journey. He chooses dogs as his symbol, and "dog" is certainly the reverse of "god". One might also think of the hounds of Hell, or Cerberus at the gates of Hades. Nonetheless it is a confrontation with his own darkness, and his undeveloped emotions.<br></br>
Our narrator then begins to do a geometric proof. When he completes the theorem, all of the ghosts melt away, the room is empty, and he realizes the absurdity of killing his brother. Rationality and logic dispel the demons of the unconscious. A rather tidy ending, and an interesting way of trying to synthesize rationality and irrationality.<br></br>
But is this really a synthesis? It plays up to the belief that we've held since at least the 19th century, that Reason will triumph and all old ghost stories and superstitions will just disappear in a puff of smoke. It is good that the narrator has talked himself out of murdering his brother rationally. But the ghosts don't really disappear. They may go away for the time being, but they will always reappear. Even in the Gigantomachy of Greek mythology, Zeus battles Typhon, the dragon, but doesn't actually kill the dragon--he simply banishes it to the depths of the Earth. The brighter our light shines, the darker our shadow behind us. These things don't go away, and the idea that Reason will conquer all is as absurd as thinking that paying for indulgences will get you to "Heaven".Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-18374528380538286792013-08-19T05:42:00.003-04:002013-08-19T05:42:30.240-04:00Graven Images (O'Hara)Politics are not logical. We often think of politicians as hypocritical, self-serving, and corrupt. In many cases, we would be right. Even politicians who start out with big visions of making a difference end up disillusioning us by failing to make any real change. But political debate that leads to reasonable results that represent the people is an ideal at best, especially in this day and age. It is largely about who you know, whose side you're on, and in some cases, how much money you have.<br></br>
John O'Hara's story "Graven Image" is about politics. A man called Browning meets at an exclusive Washington club with a man only known as the Under Secretary. He is looking for a job, knows exactly what he wants, and believes correctly that the Under Secretary can help him. But there is one odd thing that stands in the way. Browning is obviously a member of a secret society that he only refers to as the "Pork". The Under Secretary had sought admission to this club at one time, but was rejected. This is an obvious sore spot that Browning has to handle with diplomatic grace, which he does--at least initially. At the request of the Under Secretary, he pulls out a keyring that has a small, golden pig suspended from it. And here we have the "graven image", loaded with obvious associations of greed. The Beatles were not the first to think of "rich white piggies". <br></br>
The magic of the graven image gets Browning what he wants, until he lets it slip that the Under Secretary never could have hoped to be admitted to that society, and the whole deal falls apart in that moment, a hallucinatory puff of smoke. Here today, and gone five minutes later. <br></br>
At a dinner with friends the other night, someone brought up the behaviors of the upper and upper-middle classes. She found their behavior to be unnatural--almost every normal subject is taboo, especially among women. I recalled an expensive lunch at an upper class club, where no topic was appropriate except gardening. There is a lack of familiarity, as though their status must act as a wall keeping out any normal interactions with "regular" people. They seem to have a language all their own that is adept at saying nothing at all about anything of importance. My friend noted that the more she learned about the actual lives of the upper class women, the freakier it got. The kinds of life issues that hid behind mansion doors was crazier than anyone could imagine, and not in a fun way. Like any group, it's impossible to make a generalization based on our limited experience. But this weird social etiquette does exist, regardless of what it may or may not hide.<br></br>
I thought of this with regard to Browning's failure. He continually "plays the game" with the Under Secretary, and does well. He falls when he decides to talk to the Under Secretary as though he is a regular person, a good friend willing to look at past failures. This moment of familiarity loses him the thing he is seeking. Browning is like a magician that is seeking material rather than spiritual results. His golden pig has a totemistic quality; it is something clearly coveted by the Under Secretary, a sign of status and power. Magic "performed" for material ends is usually less than satisfactory, even if someone gets what they want. And politics is this kind of magic--a jumble of words that have no meaning to ordinary people, that brings about dubious material results. This kind of success is short-sighted and illusory, and perhaps that is the moral of this story. What one gains through such manipulation can be lost in a moment.<br></br>
Of course, the story could be a reflection of O'Hara's own graven image of a secret society--Yale University. O'Hara was an American writer who had great academic promise, but was unable to afford Yale when his father died an untimely death. It was a sore spot to him the rest of his life, and may have affected his personality. He was described as "irascible" and bad-tempered. Yale apparently refused to give him an honorary degree because he wanted it. While psychologizing an author's motives is not usually useful, there might be an obvious parallel here to the thorn in O'Hara's side.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-53065701392518646372013-07-08T14:55:00.002-04:002013-07-08T14:55:18.552-04:00Ireland Day 12: Coole and CraggaunowenToday is the last Ireland day I will report on, as we head to Shannon Airport bright and early tomorrow morning. <br></br>
Galway is a delightful city--it has the tourism, the diversity, the history, and the amenities of a place like Dublin or London, but on a smaller scale. I walked through many crowds in the Galway streets, but nowhere did I feel the push of crowds like I did in Dublin. Galway is also easier to navigate--I was able to find my way around the space between the 3 bridges across the Corrib with ease, and without really needing to consult a map. On this particular morning, our driver told us that we didn't need to be on the bus until 11:30, so I had time to take a long walk along the river, and to investigate more of the town. <br></br>
Once we were on the bus, we headed to Coole, which was Lady Gregory's estate. Lady Gregory was a great friend of William Butler Yeats, and it is her book of Celtic Mythology that is the most well known. She apparently had been on the Aran Islands, and while caught there in stormy weather, came to realize that there was an entire Irish culture that was almost unknown. It was through her that Gaelic schools were started in association with the Gaelic league, though she is also very well-known for her role in founding Dublin's Abbey Theatre, and writing many plays that were produced there. One surprising thing I did not know about her was that her husband was William Gregory, who introduced the hated "Gregory Clause", which forced many Irish tenants to give up their land and emigrate to Canada. If they did not give up their land, they would be given no hunger assistance. If it's not obvious, this was during the years of An Gorta Mor. <br></br>
The grounds of the estate were mostly in ruin, as the house was destroyed foolishly after Lady Gregory's death, because of sentiments against her husband. The great irony is that Lady Gregory was a key player in the revival of Irish history and culture. In the end she had to sign over the estate to the government, and leased it back for £100 a year. Among the tree-lined walkways around the house is the autograph tree, a copper beech onto which many of her illustrious visitors carved their initials. William Butler Yeats was the first. <br></br>
After lunch at Coole, we headed off to Craggaunowen, which is a re-creation of an Iron Age village, and also contains Craggaunowen Castle, a tower house from the 17th century. After it was built, the house was taken by Oliver Cromwell and his cronies, and later housed a collection of ancient artifacts now held elsewhere. Our guide was a young woman who looked so remarkably like my friend Ann, I had to do a double take. She's also the only person I encountered that said "ye" instead of "you", and she was not being dramatic. We started by visiting a replica of St. Brendan's boat, created and sailed to prove that the myth of St. Brendan crossing the Atlantic and being the first to discover America could be true. There was a replica of an Iron Age ring fort, and we all took turns risking our various phobias by passing through the souterrain. This is an underground passage used for food storage, and for hiding when invaders attacked. It is accessed by a rather dubious looking ladder, and I might have avoided it, except that it didn't go down very far. When I remarked that I was afraid of heights, one of our group, Gabriel, remarked, "That's okay, those are depths." <br></br>
We also saw a Fullacht Fiadh, which means something like " boiling pit of the deer". Venison was cooked in these pits, by filling them with water and adding sizzling hot rocks. Bill commented that he'd seen a demonstration of this, and it worked incredibly well, even though you would think the hot rocks would be cooled by the water. We also saw a replica of a crannog (which is made up of two Irish words meaning "young willow"). These were artificial islands created about 100 meters offshore, and constructed with wattles. The only entrances were by boat or by a set of stepping stones, whose configuration was only known to the family that lived there. Fencing around the crannog was spiked wood, so that invaders could not easily climb over the fence. And there was a watchtower, so that anyone coming towards the crannog could be seen. These were lived in until the 17th century. <br></br>
At the end of the tour, we had a snack before getting back on the bus. As I was walking towards the bus, I was behind a family with a boy who could not have been more than two years old. He was banging on a drum that was purchased in the souvenir shop. I think he was good enough to have a future career as a Druid bard. Or would, if such positions still existed. <br></br>
Craggaunowen was our last stop on the tour. We headed to Ennis, and there is a musical pub night at the Copper Jug, which I've skipped on account of us needing to be up tomorrow at 5:30 to head to Shannon Airport. My flight doesn't leave until 12:30, so I will have some quality time in the airport before leaving. <br></br>
If I had to give an overall impression of the trip, it would be an emotional one. I don't talk much about feelings stirred here, but I found many places struck an emotional chord with me. Being with a group had its advantages and disadvantages, as I mentioned previously. While there are many beautiful places here, and I will certainly come back, it will be nice to get home to my house and my cat. It will not be nice, however, to get back to New Jersey summer weather. I will miss the cool Irish summer days. Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-65901636394044041902013-07-07T17:04:00.001-04:002013-07-07T17:21:13.984-04:00Ireland Day 11: Ceide Fields and GalwayWe left the hotel in Ballina around 10:00 in the morning, and headed first for the Ceide Fields. This is a mesolithic and neolithic site, showing old walls that surrounded pre-historic communities. These were found underneath layers of peat in the bog, and explains why some stones look so white in the walls. The rocks are largely sandstone, and were used to keep in cattle and to keep them out of the house areas. The Mesolithic people were hunter gatherers, while the Neolithic people were farmers. It was from this period onward that the land was impacted. The earliest people came about 9,000 years ago.<br></br>
The tour was longer than expected, and we needed to get moving to get to Galway. There was some grumbling about the tour guide--she was incredibly repetitive, giving us the same information over and over unnecessarily. I think Bill was ready to throw himself off the cliff. While on the pathway, we did see a lot of interesting flora--spotted orchids, bog cotton, flax, and two different carnivorous flowers called sundew and I think butterwort. These latter flowers capture and eat flies, even though they don't look so ferocious.<br></br>
On a side note, I find that going through Ireland gives me quite a refresher in the Irish language. I took about a year and a half of Irish lessons with a local woman from Flemington, who was from Ireland, though I don't remember what part. I remember very little of what she taught me, though many phrases look familiar. For instance, "Slí Amach" means "Way Out", while "Fáilte Isteach" means "Welcome, come in". "Slán Abhaile" means "Safe home", which is surprisingly written on motorway signs. <br></br>
On the road to Galway, our bus driver played a narration of a story by Edward Kelley, a shanachie who died a few years ago. The shanachie is a storyteller, or "teller of old stories". The story he played for us was one about a priest coming for a "station" to the house of mourners at a wake. This was before Mass was regularly celebrated at a church. It was raining, and the priest came with an umbrella, which they had never seen before. He had put the opened umbrella on the floor while all duties were done, and when he finally had to leave, the people were secretly relieved, because "they wouldn't get out the bottle until he had left." After being walked to the road, he asked for his umbrella. Larry, the one attending to the priest in the story, went back to retrieve it, but he didn't know how to close it. So, he removed the door hinges, the door frame, and was about to take the cornerstone from the house, when the priest came to see what was the matter, closed it with ease, and left. Larry turned to the group and said, "Say what you like, he has special powers".<br></br>
The road to Galway was long, and we ended up stopping in a town called Ballinrobe to use toilets and grab a quick bite or a cup of coffee. I stopped in O'Connell's for a pint, and looked in vain for an open chemist shop. Most things in small towns are closed on Sundays.<br></br>
We finally arrived in Galway around 4:00, and about half our group went on a boat tour of the River Corrib. This took about an hour and a half, and included a free Irish coffee for our group. What I didn't realize was that the Irish coffee was made by Róisín Sweeney, who had the title of Powers Irish Coffee Making Champion for 2011. (Whether she still holds the title, I don't know). <br></br>
Along the way, we saw many ruined castles and Iron Age sites, as we headed towards Loch Corrib. The very first ruin was of a stronghold belonging to the DeBurgos, which was later known as the Burke family. Apparently there was a scene between the DeBurgos and the O'Flaherties. The O'Flaherties were tenants of the DeBurgos, but when the landlords demanded rent, they invited one of them down to a feast, and then beheaded him. They sent the head back to the landlord house with a note, "Here is your year's rent". I have to say that I only know 2 Flahertys, and I like both of them very much. So, no hard feelings. <br></br>
Róisín not only showed us how to make perfect Irish coffee, but showed us how to do an Irish dance that I think is called the Siege of Ennis. She needed 4 male volunteers and 3 female--from our group, I volunteered, and so did Gabriel, one of the few men on our tour. I ended up dancing with a total stranger, but it was a lot of fun, and I was told that both photo and video exist, so perhaps these will go up at some point. The day has been the warmest so far, about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. <br></br>
After the boat tour we checked into our hotel, and went our separate ways for dinner and exploration. I found a great little place called the High Street Cafe--it was in an upstairs, fairly busy, but not too busy compared to the rest of the shopping and pedestrian district near Eyre Square. There were comfortable chairs, Moroccan tea, candles, and the most delicious Italian food I've had in a long time, and it was very inexpensive. It was a good opportunity to relax and finish a book that I was reading. After dinner I visited a couple of other pubs in the area, with my favorite being a very quiet pub across the street from our hotel. I realize that weekend nights are noisy, but I prefer a place that is more laid back. <br></br>
In the last pub, I enjoyed a glass of Hennessy's rather than Guinness. The gent next to me was watching a farming show on the TV. He laughed and said "I really hate the English accent. It sounds so...public school." Further conversation revealed that his grandfather had come for a long weekend to Galway in 1950, and he never bothered going home. I asked him more about that, but he said the history was hazy to him. After a short chat, some friends of his arrived, so I headed back to my hotel, where the temperature control on the shower was broken and I had to call service. That, and the Internet connection, which shows full signal, is not working. But, I eventually got the shower working, and if you get to read this by 5PM U.S. East Coast time, then I will have gotten the Internet working.<br></br>
Tomorrow is our last day, and we are heading to Ennis. Til then...Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-14631787267043733582013-07-06T17:54:00.000-04:002013-07-06T17:54:09.454-04:00Ireland, Day 10: County Mayo and ConnemaraThis morning we left Bundoran quite early--luggage had to be on the bus by 8:45, and we were supposed to leave by 9. As a rule, we tend to leave about 15 minutes late every day. Part of it is misunderstandings--for instance, today many of the girls thought that the bus left at 9:30. The other is that the bus clock is a little bit fast. Still, we've gotten everywhere we needed to go in reasonable time, so it's not been terrible. <br></br>
It's probably a good time to talk about the pros and cons of bus touring. The plus is having a knowledgeable guide, and being able to go to places that you might not get to see as an individual, unless you were willing to go out of your way. The main "con" is a lack of freedom--you are on a schedule, have a certain amount of time in each place, and then you have to leave again at an appointed time. There have been many places where I would have preferred to hang out for hours, and then maybe get a pint locally and bring a book to read. But that isn't possible on a tour. The other thing--which could be a pro or con depending--is that you are obviously a tourist when you come off the bus. My general traveling rule when I'm abroad is to try to blend in. Certainly I don't have an Irish brogue, so I can still be picked out. But I like to feel like I'm participating in the landscape in some respect, not just gawking at it. I'm not complaining though; everyone on this tour is very nice, no one is really out of line, and it gives me a good introduction to a possible future trip on my own.<br></br>
One thing I didn't mention from the previous night is that I finally tried black pudding for the first time at La Sabbia's. Paddy had it as an appetizer, on what looked like small slices of Italian bread and some cheese on the top. It was the most delicious thing I've had, ever--I don't even care what's in it, it was SO good. I will keep that in mind the next time we have a full Irish, though I'm not sure if the black pudding will be of the same quality as that of La Sabbia. Still...<br></br>
The itinerary for the day ended up being changed, because our hotel was changed by the tour group. Originally we were supposed to stay in Westport, but we were switched to a hotel in Ballina, the Downhill Hotel (which doesn't sound good, but is actually a gorgeous hotel). I was a little disappointed about not being able to spend time in Westport--we drove through it and it looked like an amazing town with lots to do. The Irish Times took a survey, and apparently it was voted the best place to live in Ireland. I couldn't speak to that, but I definitely wanted to visit.<br></br>
Our first stop of the day was Turlough Park. This was just supposed to be a quick bathroom stop, but our driver thought it would be a good place for us to check out, and he was right. It is a folk life museum of Ireland, and shows the clothing, the basket weaving, the thatching, and all of the other crafts that the Irish had to be "handy" at on a day-to-day basis. What was most amazing was that they had videos from the 1930s of residents thatching roofs, making baskets, making fire fuel out of slurry, and so forth. We would have liked to have spent a lot more time there. As I was heading back upstairs, my roommate Deborah stopped me, and asked if I'd seen the whole Brigid exhibit downstairs. I hadn't, so I wandered down to see it, and was glad I did. <br></br>
A bit of background--Brigid is the saint whose popularity is only rivaled by St. Patrick. However, Celtic Christianity tended to blend the old and the new--old pagan customs were interwoven into the new religion. Before being considered a bishop and a saint, Brigid was a fire goddess to the Celts. I was fascinated to see that they had an old-time video of the Brigid festival of February 2, which we know as Imbolc, Candlemas, or St. Brigid's Day. In this case, the family was praying the rosary when a young girl came in holding a bhrideog--a straw effigy of Brigid. The museum had two bhrideogs on display. This is reminiscent of the ancient pagan ceremony, where the exact same thing happened, except that it honored the goddess Brigid, who was bringing the first light at what was the beginning of Celtic spring. "Imbolc" has to do with lambs being born, so this was connected with the beginnings of new life. I have some pictures of myself next to this display, though I can't post them at this time (good old 35mm single use cameras...).<br></br>
The Turlough Park is on a property owned by the DeBurghos, which is the Burke family. So, this was really a place that I could connect with, at least in terms of names. In spite of the sunny forecast, it started pouring rain, so we got back on the bus and headed down to Croagh Patrick--the holy mountain of Saint Patrick that pilgrims climb. There are still some who make the climb in their bare feet, though this is discouraged. The sun did come out for this part of the trip, so we got some good pictures of the mountain. This was mainly a lunch stop, so we got to see the natural beauty of the area, and go across the street to see John Behran's famine memorial commissioned by the Republic. This particular famine memorial is quite disturbing, showing a coffin ship with rotting skeletons. Coffin ships were the ones that took many Irish overseas to Canada mainly, as the U.S. had certain standards for ships entering their ports. Often the people had no fresh food or water for 14 weeks, and many died. About half of those who came over to escape the famine died on these ships. <br></br>
On the way out of the famine memorial area, I saw some beautiful red and purple flowers. Jodie thought they might be fuschia, as they were not bleeding hearts, though similarly structured. <br></br>
We then headed through County Mayo, towards the place where Connemara marble is mined, and the Daniel O'Hara homestead is located. It was a LOT of driving--the homestead was 2 hours from Croagh Patrick. I think I slept through most of it, which was a shame, because the scenery was gorgeous. The weather flipped from being sunny to being rainy, and the mountains were often covered in thick fog. And of course, there were sheep everywhere. <br></br>
At the Daniel O'Hara homestead, we were taken up on a bus pulled by a tractor to the mountain top. Our guide explained that this was the western-most part of Europe. He told us about the radio tower created by Marconi not far below, and noted that the some of the first transatlantic planes landed here. The radio area was destroyed during the Anglo-Irish war, when the British tried to use it to send for reinforcements against the rebels. At the homestead itself, the guide explained that Dan O'Hara's story was that of 65,000 others. The landlords of the estates would evict the tenants, set the roof of the house on fire, and push the walls in. The tenants then often got on the coffin ships to the new world. There is a famous song about Dan O'Hara, selling matches on a street corner in America:<br></br>
Sure it' poor I am today,<br>
For God gave and took away,<br>
And left without a home poor Dan O'Hara<br>
With these matches in my hand,<br>
In the frost and snow I stand <br>
So it's here I am today your brokenhearted<br></br>
The English tried to get rid of Irish culture, and their way of life, because they didn't understand it. The first thing Cromwell tried to ban was the drinking, because he thought the drinking made them fight the way they did. But the Irish are of Celtic heritage, and don't fight like the English. This was Napoleon's mistake, as Wellington, despite the British uniform, was an Irishman. The fact that Irish culture has survived is a testament to the strength of the Irish people, and a lesson to the world. We ended our visit with a shot of Irish whiskey (Uisce beatha, the water of life), and a toast that went something like this:<br></br>
Many blessings from my heart <br>
And to our friends <br>
I wish them well <br>
And to those who don't like us <br>
They can go to hell <br></br>
After the tour, I bought myself a ring containing Connemara marble. The tour guide told me that the marble is about 900 million years old. <br></br>
Another two hours of driving, and we ended up at our hotel. After enjoying some O'Hara's barrel aged series of Leann Follain Irish Stout, it was time for an early bed and a book. Only two more days to our trip.Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-78088079865168054742013-07-06T02:22:00.003-04:002013-07-06T02:22:51.115-04:00Ireland Day 9: Sliabh Liag, Glencolmcille, and DonegalFor the first time this week, the clouds broke early and it was a warm, sunny day in Western Ireland. The high temperature here is usually about 75 degrees Fahrenheit, though I've heard it gets up to 80 degrees on occasion. It appears that it will be this way for the rest of the trip, so it should be smooth sailing.<br></br>
We drove about an hour and a half south to Sliabh Liag, or Slieve League as it's known in English. While driving through Donegal, our driver pointed out the Gaeltacht areas. In the Republic of Ireland, road signs are in Irish and English. In Northern Ireland, they are in English only. In the Gaelteacht areas, the signs are only in Irish--and in some places, in old Irish. John said that the use of the old alphabet was largely discontinued, as Irish was confusing enough to young people without throwing in the difficulty of the old alphabet. <br></br>
Sliabh Liag means something like "mountain of flat stones", and it is a tall cliff, much taller than the famous Cliffs of Moher in Southern Ireland. Our guide told us that you could walk across the mountain along the top in about 5 1/2 hours. "You can go to the top to take pictures," he said. "But if your photographer tells you to step back, don't listen to them." Indeed, once you get past the area with a fence, there is a steep rise to the top. Most of us who had a fear of heights didn't go very far past the area with the fence. Really, you could just find a rock to sit on, and enjoy the sound of the ocean along the cliffs. And, there's a truck at the car park that sells ice cream, so of course we all had that as well. The views from Sliabh Liag are spectacular, and we spent more time there than we should. We had to take a shuttle up to the walkway, as our bus never would have cleared those roads.<br></br>
On the road to Glencolmcille, we passed hundreds of sheep. Like other country places, stepping in sheep crap is always a potential hazard. We were amazed that some sheep were standing right at the edge of the cliffs. But then again, sheep are stupid. Our guide said that there were something like 180,000 people in the area, and about a million sheep. (Yes, that was a joke.) But they were definitely ubiquitous. <br></br>
Glencolmcille is a recreated folk village in Donegal. A 16-year-old young man gave us a tour of the main buildings, which shows Irish homes from the 1650s to about the 1950s. There was no electricity in that part of Ireland until 1956, and that was only a few homes--most people didn't have electricity until the 1970s. We had stopped for lunch, and I chatted with the woman in the gift shop. She asked if I had any Irish ancestry. When I told her that I was from the Burke family, she exclaimed, "Oh, from this area? We have a lot of Burkes in this area." I told her that I was told that my great-grandfather came from Dublin, but that my information is not particularly reliable, so I don't know if that's true. The other woman in the store said, "Oh, well you've got the dark hair and blue eyes, you're one of us anyway." The two women chatted to themselves in Irish, which made this the first time we heard anyone really converse in the language. <br></br>
The Irish do have a few English expressions that I've noticed. They do say "Tis" out here, as in "Tis a mild day today." When they say "thank you", it's "thanks a million." Instead of "lovely" or "brilliant", they usually say "grand". <br></br>
We ended our day in Donegal town. There was a tour of Donegal Castle, but I headed for a bookstore to poke around, as if I need to put any more books in my suitcase. The religion section was entirely Catholic, as you might expect, and any materials on other religions were usually some kind of apologetic material warning against them, which is a bit surprising. The Irish myth and folklore section was best, and I ended up with another book of fairy stories from there. I headed over to the pub for a pint, and the locals were anxious to strike up conversation. One red-headed gentleman asked me, "So, are you here with your husband?" I said, "No, I'm here with a tour group. I ditched the husband 10 years ago." He said, "Oh! Then I should go home and put on some cologne." We talked about New Jersey, and the Jersey Shore (he swore it was a TV show and not a place), and mentioned something about Jersey women and big boobs. I said, "Oh, well, you won't find those here." They were betting on horses in the bar, and when he got up to place his bet, the female bartender shook her head. "He's full of some good craic, he is." <br></br>
I headed back to the bus, as we didn't have a whole lot of time. The place was packed with tourists--the man in the bar told me that there was a festival going on up the street, so apparently everyone was there for that. They don't usually get that many tourists, apparently.<br></br>
Our night finished up in La Sabbia, where we had another excellent meal, and entertainment was "open mic", where all of us got up and sang or recited something. Kat and I went first, doing our off the cuff rendition of The Philosopher's Drinking Song. Others did more contemporary songs, or ones they wrote themselves. My roommate Deborah came up with another great song about Kathy (who found a used condom in her room, after her experience of being flashed by a leprechaun in a kilt in Dublin), and a group of women having a birthday party in the back, came out and started dancing in a big circle. They sang a few songs themselves, and we sang happy birthday to the two women sharing a birthday, Theresa and Phyllis. (No, we really don't know either of them, they were just really "full of the craic" as they say.) Niamh had her own wonderful song about tequila and late nights in Irish bars, and she ended up finishing with "American Pie", a song I thought was banned by Bill from this event, but maybe it was because Niamh was performing it. Bill himself had to read from the Gettysburg Address, and we sang a few patriotic songs. The Irish ladies sang their own national anthem. It was great fun, and our last night with Niamh, as our last 3 days are on our own. Next up will be County Mayo, and that is for another day...Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36658090.post-79461802699377449442013-07-05T03:16:00.004-04:002013-07-05T03:16:25.363-04:00Ireland Day 8: An Irish 4th of JulyDay 8 of my Ireland trip was July 4, which is Independence Day back home. I had asked Bill what the day's itinerary would be the day before at Brennan's, but he would only say it was a surprise. <br></br>
I woke up fairly early in the morning after another late night, but it was raining and cold outside. I went back to bed for a couple of hours, and when I awoke again, the sun was out. I put on my sweater and took a walk along the cliffs of Bundoran's beaches. I found a place to mail my last postcard, and picked up the cliff walk near the tourist information center. It was very windy, but the scenery was breathtaking; rock formations, cliffs, and small tidal pools of green and gray water dotted the coastline. There were tall grasses along the edges of the cliffs, and everything bounced and swayed in the breezes. I walked past a small amusement park, and a mini-golf course. On the hill a ways down was a convention center. I was looking for a formation called the Fairy Bridges, and I found it around the corner. As I was approaching the area, the wind howled in such a way that I was reminded of M.R. James' story, "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad." After hearing the wind, all I could think was, "Quis est iste qui venit? (Who is this who is coming?)" The howling wind was followed by a sudden wave of rain, and the wind picked up to what seemed like hurricane force for a few minutes. I made my way to the Fairy Bridges, but had to turn back shortly after. Once I reached the amusement park again, everything had calmed down and the sun was out. Such is the nature of Irish weather, at least on the coast. <br></br>
We got onto the tour bus at 11:00, and we ended up at a place called Ulster American Folk Park. Many American presidents' families came from the Ulster area, and the museum itself is basically a museum of Irish emigration. Much of it happens to be to the United States. The setup is like a Colonial Williamsburg, with replica houses from the period, as well as replica storefronts with antique bottles and boxes of the period. There is also a replica of a ship that took Irish emigrants to Canada and the United States in 1816. The guide stood in front of rather small bunk beds, and said that there were 4 or 5 people to a bed. The food consisted of a dry granola-like porridge, and possibly salted fish if the person was lucky. The average voyage was 3 months. If someone died, they were thrown overboard, as they would not be allowed to dock with dead bodies on board. The guide asked about our Irish background, and when I told him I was a Burke, he mentioned the famous philosopher Edmund Burke. "Edmund was my great-grandfather's name," I told him. "But he definitely wasn't that guy."<br></br>
We saw a re-enactment of a skirmish from 1776 in Upstate New York, with the Iroquois supporting the British troops. They fought against the colonists because they were concerned about their own freedom. As one of our group said later, "Their concerns were obviously well-founded." A few of us stuck around for a re-enactment of the 1776 reading of the Declaration of Independence, which was dramatized complete with Loyalist opponents. This was supposed to be the re-enactment of a reading in Easton, Pennsylvania (which they incorrectly indicated as being close to Philadelphia, when it's at least an hour away from there, but let's not split hairs.) It's always interesting to see American history from the point of view of other countries, and certainly they pick up on details that you would not see in American re-enactments. Certainly, in the re-enacted skirmish, the British drove the Patriots to a retreat, which you would not be likely to see in an American re-enactment. It was funny to see re-enactors with their cell phones or digital cameras. It created something of a kitsch factor, but there always is anyway, regardless of where or how it's performed. On the whole, one of our group dubbed it "surreal" to see the Irish re-enacting American history. That was probably a good summary. Easton, PA never looked so good, at least not since I've been there. <br></br>
I learned that the bus driver was a Morrissey fan, and saw him with the Smiths. Funny, I wouldn't have pegged him as a Morrissey fan. But there it is. <br></br>
After leaving the park, we went to see St. Patrick's Well, and a cave where Catholics said Mass when their religion was outlawed by the English. The area is very green, and near a rushing river. The place was very beautiful, and had a tremendous feel to it. It was difficult to see the well head, but Niamh showed us where it was, at the edge of a lough. After leaving the well area, we headed into Ballyshannon to check out a store selling locally made crafts, and we stopped for a pint of Donegal Blonde, a new blonde beer brewed locally. The owner told us that they've only been brewing Donegal Blonde for about 5 months. It's very good, especially for those who like lagers. I'm more of a stout/porter type of chick, so the bus driver mentioned the off-licence next door, which had a huge variety of brews from all over. It turns out that the owner of Dicey's Bar (where the Donegal Blonde is brewed) also runs the Off-Licence, so he recommended a new O'Hara special edition stout. I bought a bottle of that, as well as a Belfast Black, which I wanted to try. Both are sitting in my hotel refrigerator as of this writing. I'm sure one will be gone by the time I go to bed. <br></br>
We returned to Bundoran, where Niamh's husband Paddy had prepared some American barbecue to celebrate the 4th, including burgers, chicken, ribs, and corn on the cob. It was all very good, and I returned to my room feeling stuffed to the gills. I could not help but reflect on the fact that I did more to celebrate Independence Day in Ireland than I do at home. While I might not have chosen to go someplace like the Ulster American park on my own, it proved to be an interesting experience in viewing one's own culture through another lens.
Brigid N. Burkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16954486097108820795noreply@blogger.com2