Alright so this for as hard as it was for me to actually write my paper, its equally hard to try and explain it, but I shall try.

To start, I wanted to blur the line between dream and “reality” and blur the significance of events in each, for often dreams can be more profound or moving than what we ‘experience’ as we are awake.
I really wanted to work with the idea of metafiction, discuss how difficult it is to write about the unwritiable, and to essentially ‘disenchant’ myself.
But more importantly I wanted to relive the experience of reading Borges and becoming deeply involved. Not in the form of metafiction, because I wanted to move away from writing about writing, into writing about reading, about the few experiences of connectivity we have when we read these works that virtually envelope us. To do this I wanted to draw more and more of Borges work into my own. I felt like the normal essay uses quotes to support their argument, I wanted to use quotes but in a different fashion (the blue-possibly grey out of the non color printer- italicized words were Borges. I needed to differentiate them from my own so as not to plagiarize, but I didn’t want to break the illusion with “ “ and page #. This was also meant to allude to the ideas that my paper followed and that Borges worked with, that we all, essentially are one. We all have been Shakespeare, all Nabokov and so on. So that language is shared throughout, knowledge as a whole is shared throughout, these are all internalized…and it was part of the realization I experienced to understand this (and many more) concepts.
Then I wanted to break from the ‘read-sequence’ into a new awakening, where I was able to differentiate from his work and my own and the language was meant to be a little more clear.
It ends abruptly because I wanted to, (and was only able to) show that the conveyance of such themes is virtually not representable. To nowhere you are is to know through a way of insignificance, that being said the recognition of insignificance is in turn the recognition of total significance.

Final Blog...maybe

Well, it always seems right to say, "it's over". or something like, "I'm sad that this class is finished and all the blogging is done with".- these are the phrases I actually started this blog with, and that I've started some of my "final" blogs before with, but I realize that this is not a point of closure. not one bit.
I am very happy that Sam is willing to keep up with the blogs for at least a little while after class is done, (I had originally thought i would have kept blogging into this year after our Nabokov class but sadly i did not)So I hope to maybe contribute a little more before we all get too far into the summer, but what has become clear to me over the past few years, is that the blogs are once facet of our learning (turly and amazing one) but just because the blogs mast stop, just because we may not all congregate together in a room for an hour or so, doesn't mean that this class is in anyway over. We have all been granted keys to unfathomable doors, -in number and in their direction- I know that personally, from each class I've taken with Dr. Sexson, i find that the material, the understandings, the sense of community and connectivity, do not end when the class does, instead they stay alongside, inside you, they do not wither, they flourish.

Rachel put it well that, Dr. Sexson has a posse. And for those of you who have just been initiated i know you will forever be a part, even if you are graduating. For any of you who have had the pleasure of learning with Sutter Strummel, you would see an example that this class, this true radiance does not adhere to school calenders, Even those of us who graduate, drop out, or even switch over to the dark side of the school curriculum, we all have been infected we are all part of an intimate group, and the membership is lifelong.

I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity

In one of those common cases where I wish to share just a couple quotes I like, to get at sense of the beauty, and understanding of what i'm reading...I again find it impossible to limit or extract anything too specific, for virtually everything that Borges writes should be quoted-in its entirety- so. because what he writes is essentially what I am trying to convey in my paper, but with far better prose than I, I will share with you the just a piece of his work The Aleph
This is from a website -i didn't feel like transcribing the whole thing- so it might not be verbatim how it is actually written but it should get at the understanding.
I am sharing this to more or less get other people on bored with Borges, because i had never read him or even heard of him before until he was recommended to me at finnegans wake reading,
I went out, bought a collection of his work, and opened up to this...

He hesitated, then with that level, impersonal voice we reserve for confiding something intimate, he said that to finish the poem he could not get along without the house because down in the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.

"It's in the cellar under the dining room," he went on, so overcome by his worries now that he forgot to be pompous. "It's mine -- mine. I discovered it when I was a child, all by myself. The cellar stairway is so steep that my aunt and uncle forbade my using it, but I'd heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself. One day when no one was home I started down in secret, but I stumbled and fell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph."

"The Aleph?" I repeated.

"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept the discovery to myself and went back every chance I got. As a child, I did not foresee that this privilege was granted me so that later I could write the poem. Zunino and Zungri will not strip me of what's mine -- no, and a thousand times no! Legal code in hand, Doctor Zunni will prove that my Aleph is inalienable."

I tried to reason with him. "But isn't the cellar very dark?" I said.

"Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too."

"You wait there. I'll be right over to see it."

I hung before he could say no. The full knowledge of a fact sometimes enables you to see all at once many supporting but previously unsuspected things. It amazed me not to have suspected until that moment that Carlos Argentino was a madman. As were all the Viterbos, when you came down to it. Beatriz (I myself often say it) was a woman, a child, with almost uncanny powers of clairvoyance, but forgetfulness, distractions, contempt, and a streak of cruelty were also in her, and perhaps these called for a pathological explanation. Carlos Argentino's madness filled me with spiteful elation. Deep down, we had always detested each other.

On Garay Street, the maid asked me kindly to wait. The master was, as usual, in the cellar developing pictures. On the unplayed piano, beside a large vase that held no flowers, smiled (more timeless than belonging to the past) the large photograph of Beatriz, in gaudy colours. Nobody could see us; in a seizure of tenderness, I drew close to the portrait and said to it, "Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, darling Beatriz, Beatriz now gone forever, it's me, it's Borges."

Moments later, Carlos came in. He spoke dryly. I could see he was thinking of nothing else but the loss of the Aleph.

"First a glass of pseudo-cognac," he ordered, "and then down you dive into the cellar. Let me warn you, you'll have to lie flat on your back. Total darkness, total immobility, and a certain ocular adjustment will also be necessary. From the floor, you must focus your eyes on the nineteenth step. Once I leave you, I'll lower the trapdoor and you'll be quite alone. You needn't fear the rodents very much -- though I know you will. In a minute or two, you'll see the Aleph -- the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our true proverbial friend, the multum in parvo!"

Once we were in the dining room, he added, "Of course, if you don't see it, your incapacity will not invalidate what I have experienced. Now, down you go. In a short while you can babble with all of Beatriz' images."

Tired of his inane words, I quickly made my way. The cellar, barely wider than the stairway itself, was something of a pit. My eyes searched the dark, looking in vain for the globe Carlos Argentino had spoken of. Some cases of empty bottles and some canvas sacks cluttered one corner. Carlos picked up a sack, folded it in two, and at a fixed spot spread it out.

"As a pillow," he said, "this is quite threadbare, but if it's padded even a half-inch higher, you won't see a thing, and there you'll lie, feeling ashamed and ridiculous. All right now, sprawl that hulk of yours there on the floor and count off nineteen steps."

I went through with his absurd requirements, and at last he went away. The trapdoor was carefully shut. The blackness, in spite of a chink that I later made out, seemed to me absolute. For the first time, I realised the danger I was in: I'd let myself be locked in a cellar by a lunatic, after gulping down a glassful of poison! I knew that back of Carlos' transparent boasting lay a deep fear that I might not see the promised wonder. To keep his madness undetected, to keep from admitting he was mad, Carlos had to kill me. I felt a shock of panic, which I tried to pin to my uncomfortable position and not to the effect of a drug. I shut my eyes -- I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph.

I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

and it never rains but it pours

just perusing, semi-proofreading my last blog, I noticed that I subconsciously put the word Reality in "" and thus I was drawn to remember our fair Lolita and her Nabokov, "reality is one of the few words which mean nothing without the quotes"
what a perfect backing to my emerging thoughts
alignment with the universe.

And it never rains but it pours-Borges, The Zahir

Sometimes i feel like Henry Darger

I hadn't ever even heard of the man, I had no concept or knowledge of his life or work, but after watching a PBS documentary about this man, in conjunction with the utter massive amount of time I've been spending writing term papers these past few weeks-- i feel i am become Henry Darger.
For those you like I (the former I) who don't know about this man, check out this site http://www.saraayers.com/darger.htm to give a brief overview however, Henry Darger was an extremely reclusive janitor in the early 1920's he had no friends, spent all of his time working, or in his apartment talking to himself...and working some more. A few years after his death, a 15,000 page story was found, complete with elaborate drawings and music, an entire fantastical world all his own creation.

Now I defiantly don't have 15,000 pages and i can't draw-at all, but all of this writing, all of this engagement in what is essentially the same artificial world, the world of dreamscapes and storylines, has left me seamlessly transcending between the realms of fiction and reality.
A lot of people seem to pity Darger for his seemingly empty life, and while that may be true, how can we dismiss the unfathomably complex and beautiful world in which he chose to live, chose to create.

Now for the safety of my well being i think its important for me to make a clear distinction between these two worlds, but the deeper that this class, these books have taken me the hard that becomes.
To draw some more poignant words, i turn to Borges--for he has consumed me as of late, in one of his short stories The Zahir in which a coin (the zahir) has taken over his thoughts, his life his "reality" this concept of dual worlds, consumption, knowledge... "others will dream that i am mad, while i dream of the Zahir. When every man on earth thinks, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be dream and which reality, the earth or the Zahir?"

That's Amore!

in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can't stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strummans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deep-dark and ample like this red bog at sundown.

the Buddha on trashy literature.

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will never be shortened, happiness never decreased by being shared The Buddha.

With all the discussion of high vs. low brow, this quote was given to me and reassured me. If lots of people read a particular book...(as Dr. Sexson said--So What?)

Borges

As of recent, I have been time and time again recommended to read Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer with whom i had previously been unaware. I decided that I might as well pick up a collection of his fiction and read--in order to separate myself from the sea of thematic waves that this class an others have dragged me by in inescapable tidal currents-- Borges however, is yet another tsunami.
One though, that I am happy if not elated to surf. I actually, am somewhat convinced that I would like to write my paper incorporating his works, if not focusing on them.
To give you just an idea of how central his writing is to the themes we sit atop, here are just a few (of inumerous) passages that are a distillation of assigned texts.

--These are all from his short story collection entitled the Aleph--

opening the collection, in quoting an essay by Francis Bacon, Borges cites,
"Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth.
So that as Plato had imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

'Nine doors opened to into that cellar-like place; eight led to a maze that retunred, deceitfully to the same chamber; the ninth led through another maze to a second chamber identical to the first (187)"

"I felt that it had existed before human kind, before the world itself. Its pattern antiquity (though somehow terrible to the eyes) seemed to accord with the labor of immortal artificers. (1879)"

"We accept reality so readily--perhaps because we sense that nothing is real (190)"

now in conversation with the dog Argos:
" I asked Argos how much of the Odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.
Very little, he replied. Less than the megerest rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since i last wrote it.

"No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world--which is a long way of saying that i am not. "

"I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men--I shall be dead"

"Thus, in 1946, by the grace of his long-held passion, Pedro Damian died in the defeat at Masoller, which took place between the winter and spring of the year 1904"

" I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story and so on, ad infinitum (And just when i stop believing in him, "Averroes" disappears). 241)

"Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of cause and effects"

"Idealist doctrine has it that the verbs "to live" and "to dream" are at every point synonyms; for me, thousands upon thousands of appearances will pass into one; a complex dream into a simple one."

then in discussing this coin, the Zahir over which he obsesses, it consumes him:

"In order to loose themselves in God, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names mean nothing anymore. I long to travel that path. Perhaps by thinking about the Zahir unceasingly, I can manage to wear it away; perhaps behind the coin is God. (249)

If any of you have the chance: Read Borges. Purely amazing.
Like Santiago finding that the gears of the world click in his favor; this author fell into my lap, and completed the labyrinth.

So What?

to note: the following is more or less a yawp of ideas.

So what? This is the question that has driven all men, all things and specifically me for the past few days. I have been un able, try as I might to remove myself from this thought, I have been plagued as it were with an unquenchable obsession. So What? I do not know. But I have had the unyielding feeling, throughout my entire life, yet now it throbs and surges. The seams of my life’s fabric are beginning to strain and burst. It is as if the world has become undone. Peeled away I am become engrossed in this idea of what I supposed could be best described as the Matrix, but to even give it a name is almost laughable for it is in its nature (though it has none, has all, is none is all) unnamable.

A great deal of things-I shall call them- have cumulated over the past few years, and over the past few weeks these things have become more and more rapid and radiant. I shall try to limit them and describe them in understandable and simple means.

-For a long time, for all time We, I, All have been and are still blind.

-To recognize and the blindness is not to see, but it is a movement towards seeing.

-Every religion is the same.

-Everything is the same.

Last night I went to a lecture on William Blake, I suppose this if any is a proper place to start. We all know, or at least should be familiar with some of Blake’s work. What he was getting at, is the same idea that we, the movie the matrix, and everything essentially is leading to. The Doors of perception, and fin(again)ally what is beyond those doors. This is what has been driving me, towards enlightenment or insanity I have not yet discerned. But if we try, at least attempt to grasp this concept, we may ourselves learn to fly. "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

I realize more and more that this may be the absolute truth.

A lot of people speculate that Blake took drugs that induced his visions, to induce his work. Marvin Landsverk tells us no. this is wrong. I believe him. For I do not believe that it is necessary to take drugs to understand this, to read books to understand this, to have science reassure us that this is true. Though, all these things may be an avenue that lead us there, they are not completely necessary. But let us explore these avenues.

First the drugs…

Clearly Aldous Huxley was inspired by Blake. Maybe even more clearly he was inspired by drugs. (On his death bed, moments before death He asked his wife to inject him with a tremendous amount of LSD). We have to erase our negative perception of drugs for a few moments, we have to realize that our everyday functions, function on drug impulses (serotonin, adrenaline, dopamine, DMT-I will get to this later) so to disregard or in anyway devalue a so called “drug experience” is to devalue or dismiss existence as we know it (not know it?).

Anyway, Huxley wrote a few novels about the drugs experience and its door perception cleaning properties, mind ajax. Also note, in the film The Matrix, Upon Neos return to work after his initial awakening there is a scene in which he is talking to his boss, though not seeming involved in the conversation (beyond the keanu norm) and there are the repetition of squeaks, as the window washers out side clean.*

Huxley, speaking of use of drugs states, “urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience.” To see “a brief bug timeless illumination” he goes on to say “To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness” and that “Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be” sound familiar? It ought to, we have read this before, not only in the Four Quartets or everything we have been reading, rather we have read this line before, in fact we have all written it. Though I want to talk about this point later, but I just picked up -after much recommendation- a collection of works by Jorge Luis Borges, he says amongst and array of profundity, “I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men-I shall be dead.”

-to interject, I must apologize for a lack of form and seeming construct, what I am trying to talk about rejects all form-

Back. In another example of connectivity, and understanding. I will tell you about a friend I have, that shared with me an experience in which he saw “the gears of the world” as he coined.

There is this South American plant, used often in religious ceremonies and shammanesq visual quest, called Ayuwaska (something like that) the active ingredient is the drug DMT, which interestingly enough is in most plants, most animals, and in all of us…yes. It is created in the brain, the pineal gland often referred to as the “Third Eye”

My friend took Ayuwaska and described the following,

“I began to here a buzzing, louder than a freight train and increasing in intensity, I remember saying something like “uh-oh” and then I was overcome. The buzzing soon was felt in the center of my mind, my third eye, the vibrations I heard and felt throughout my body were mirrored in my third eye, pulsing on the same pattern. I first saw lighting bolts shooting out of everything and tying all things together, as I looked closer the lighting bolts became crazy geometric patterns, almost like fractals with no end or beginning, just expanding upon themselves, but they were all intertwined wither everything, every aura was an extension of another and all was tied by blue-electric-geometric- fractals. I then tried to meditate, and I felt my mind soaring through time and space and I saw that time and space were only illusionary .I was shooting through infinity. It was very intense.”

This is very similar to a lot of what Huxely has to say, and Leary and all the other gurus, There are books upon this subject.

The drug DMT, as I said before is in almost everything, but it is most importantly present in our minds. There is a Dr. Straussmen, (I believe that is his name) has done extensive research on this drug and has concluded, that the drug is released in the mind and the moment of birth, of death, and every night when we dream.

If this is true, and I could really spend weeks discussing this, but if this is true and just try and comprehend this, then at our “birth” and “death” and our entrance and departure from this world, we are exposed to the true gears of the world, then the line between birth and death become far more blurred, and the idea of awakening of birth is far more interesting. In dreams too, we are experiencing this otherworld. We enter another dimension of our capable mind. Then term “it was all a dream” become far more than an easy way to end short story.

-I really am un able to discuss this in its wholeness, and I feel that it is necessary for us to meditate upon this individually-

But think about this, and Finnegans Wake, about lucid dreaming, about…I don’t know, everything. What it means to dream, to wake, to die, to be born. This is an avenue to the truly infinite world that Blake was talking about.

Another interesting thing: Lucid dreaming. Has anyone ever seen Waking Life? You should. In it, it talks about the capability to lucid dream, that is to balance the unconscious self with the conscious mind, that is to balance the DMT in our minds, to flirt with the Doors of Perception.

Now think about Egypt.

-Heavy emphasis on this idea of the third eye

- The other worlds

Now, my knowledge, (at least the knowledge I remember, for if I truly subscribe to this idea, I and everyone has absolute knowledge, we just forgot)

When, in ancient Egypt, pharos died, they would have to pass through the underworld and accomplish a long series of tasks and trials described to them, but the “book of the dead” in order to get into the afterlife.

To pass through this test, the deceased must maintain focus, not forget, keep the balance going, hold their breath until they get through all their trials, without missing a beat, essentially maintain the lucid dream, do not wake, do not fall.

Another interesting thing: I watched this film recently called What the Bleep do We Know? In it, they described that when an molecule, or atom…one of those tiny things is created, they can take one if its electrons and bring it to the other end of the universe, then enact a charge onto another at the very other end of the universe, and both will respond, instantly. Damn. So this means that either information can travel and a pure infinite speed, or that the idea, or perception of space and time are illusionary. And, If we are to believe that all things were created at one moment, “The Big Bang” from one thing, than we are all connected to all things, and the space and time we perceive is an illusion of separation. Damn.

Also, this film discussed how they have recorded one object in 3,000 places at one time. NO JOKE. Not split up, but just in 3,000 places at once. The double slit experiment is also wicked crazy, but I don’t really have the patience to discuss it here. Just check it out on google, it will twist your cap back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEzRdZGYNvA --crazy.

Ok, so back to the so what?

So what, they succeed in turning lead into gold. Though unimportant in the grand scheme, it is entirely important in the grand scheme.

For it is scientific, empirical evidence (for those who need the reassurance) that lead and gold are one, or perhaps that there is no lead, and there is no gold. And what is the obsession with gold and all that shit anyway? I don’t really get it.

But Huxley talks about it a little bit, and I then made sense to me,
“In other words, precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary. ‘the view of the world,’ says Plato, ‘is a vision of the blessed beholders’; for to see things, ‘as they are in themselves’ is bliss and unalloyed and inexpressible”

So gold just makes us remember that we know everything I the world. And are everything

And the fact that scientist turned lead into gold. Is proof! Of the illusion of space and time and separation, it is proof that all things are one.

I can’t really go on

. Read and you will see, meditate and you will see, dream, die, get born, and you will see. Do illegal activity and you will see.

I will try to talk more later.

The entire world is to be said.

To Alicia

I'll preface by saying that, I understand I might not really have strong footing to make the following comments as I am a male and I can't really transpose myself, or empathize. And in some ways I agree with your ideas. But, to involve yourself with an unchangeable facet of the story or play, is to limit yourself. It will bring all things to a halt. If followed to rigidly it can lead to the same type of mentality that brought about book burning/ banning. I know that this is far from you, but it applies to the same principles and the same means. I know you are a self described Orwellian writer, and I'm sure you've read some Bradbury, he has a really well known quote that says, "you don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, you just have to get people to stop reading them". and obviously you've read the tempest, and i guess i can't ask you to enjoy it, but don't allow for such a trivial thing to prohibit you from obtaining something so epochal.

'lo bro

I know I am in heaven for I have been through hell. I loved samuel beckett's work, but part of the love was the refreshing notion that this was not my life, and part of the refreshment comes from being done with the book. So it is more than clean air I breathe when reading Shakespeare, it is sweet and airy. Like a pecan pie after a long supper of bones and marrow, The Tempest is my dessert.
The term though, is perhaps ill fitting- yet quite snug, and all cut from the same cloth. For language I find tastes like pie, but I know full well that it nourishes the body and soul like...wheat grass. But I find, or i have heard, for most people Shakespeare tastes like wheat-grass and does little more to nourish the soul than stick of butter.
In one of my classes the other day (I shall try to be anonymous even though i don't even know the names of the people in question) when we were beginning a section on Shakespeare's sonnets, I heard the following conversation (and this is verbatim):
bro gurl 1: I hate Shakespeare, this stuff is so stupid. It sucks
bro gurl 2: Me too, he really sucks especially these poems.
2: I know. I hate poetry, its like a complicated and dumb-fancy way of saying really simple stuff. HAHA!
1: I KNOOOW! (in a very bady accent) "me thinkiest me loveth thou. who art as pretty as a pretty rose" HAHA! this stuff just sucks, i mean i like some of his novels i guess but this poetry is-
2: really? I hate his novels! I mean I guess I haven't really read any besides Romeo and Juliette.
1: I never read that, I was supposed to for a class but I just watched the movie instead. I read King Lear though which was really weird, my teacher was soooo creepy.
2: HAHA! yeah, I mean I love the movies, but I just hate the books

I kid you not.
what is the acceptance rate at MSU again?...anyway this made me laugh more than it made me want to beat this very small freshman girls with a Shakespeare "novel". This really made me laugh when I remembered this movie that I saw, which ironically I first watched and thought it was a very bad 'low brow' movie, until i paid attention... if you haven't seen Orange County. do so. or just watch this brief clip about Shakespeare. This should make you laugh

But I digress. All these thoughts epiphanied me and I began to see the unraveling pattern that even in the lowest of the low, one can soar to the highest elevation. The inverse of this being equally true. Its all a matter of our approche, our perception and acception of what is at hand.

The Tempest will give you all the glory and radiance of prose and style that one should expect but, and for anyone who reads the play will realize, it gives you far more than fabulous production, it shows you the gears of the watch.The ropes and curtains of the set ("these our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air') It is a play of deception, it is an expression of and exultation of the lies we are told, it is the wiping away of tattooed tales. We must embrace both the tale told and the telling. Both emotions are canonized here with utmost eloquence, whether we see the clockworks and know, "we are such stuff as dreams are made of" or we wish to be spell-bound as I often do (and this is a soliloquy often turn to):

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments.
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if i then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

To clarify

I said the other day in class that page 44 (starting with the last line of 43) was my opus page. And it is, but I found out that only a couple people have the same copy of Beckett that I do-The one that is black and blue and has Beckett on the cover with shades.
I apologize for anyone looking up in there books page 44 (if anyone actually did. though it probably is just as powerful...but just as easily could deal with his asshole of all things) anyway the page I was talking about begins with.
"For in me there two fools among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on."

this, though devastatingly bleak, I find blindingly illuminating,
Though I essentially have the entire page underlined, i actually ended up circling the entire page, I will share some of the moments within my opus page that stood out

"And that night there was no question of moon, nor any other light, but it was a night of listening, a night given faint soughing and sighing stirring at night in the little pleasure garden, the shy sabbath of leaves and petals and the air that eddies there as it does not in other places where there is less constraint, and as it does not during the day, when there is more vigilance."

"And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden as it rode the earth of deeps and wilderness. Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be."

"I was the precarious calm, the thaw of snows which make no difference and all the horrors of it all all over again. But that did not happen to me often."

"mostly I stayed in my jar which knew neither seasons nor gardens. And a good thing too. But in there you have to be careful, ask yourself questions, as for example whether you still are, and if no when it stopped, and if yes how long will it still go on, anything at all to keep you from losing the thread of the dream.

"so that i might believe i was still there. And yet it meant nothing to me to be still there. I called that thinking."

really the entire page should be listed here, though I have come close, from this alone anyone should be able to see the importance, or power, the engulfment nature of this writing. It has the facade of being bleak and depressing, but all the contrary i find it almost blissful. I find zen in these lines. To add, its all the while hilarious if you take time to recognize the humor, or rather take the effort to remove yourself from the dredges. As Sexson said, this is not a true story, when there is child abuse-we should be laughing, it has to be taken with a heavy bit of salt but all that horrible and wicked stuff is funny if you just can see it for that.

I've told people about this and they've read some and i feel they get the impression I am a really dark person, which is funny to me because quite the opposite, and i think that may be why I enjoy this so much because these things are void from my life, and though it is a novel of emptying out, it is an essential and equally important part of the movments to become full once again.
This book is steeped in refuse, it is rotten, manure, decayed, depraved all these things.
but it is the fertilizer of life. and humor and even beauty
born of the ashes.

"Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires"
"Sunday Morning" Wallace Stevens

Ship of Theseus

Last night i was getting the itch to get out and do something to change the pace of things. As it was 10:30 and I was about 8 beers deep, getting up into the mountains wasn't a viable option. So i did the next best thing: backyard camping.

Sitting around the fire( mostly cardboard and a broken chair-hobo style-) finishing off the beers and starting at the wine, we got into the discussion of Eliot and Beckett and the eternal return. My memory was drawn to a class I took with Dr. Prashanta, who is by the way one of the funniest professors I've had year, whether that is his intention I know not. Anyway, he discussed with us among many other themes, (including the Bahgvad Gita-very knowledgeable...guest speaker?) the philosophy, or the question of the Ship of Theseus.

Paraphrasing, the ship of Theseus was a great massive wooden ship...as time went on it began to deteriorate, repairs were needed, at first one plank of wood was replaced with a new... then a second and a third and so on. At what point, does this Ship of Theseus cease to be itself, and become a new being all together?

Reading Beckett, as I have been doing obsessively, though slowly (I find it is impossible to read quickly, as each sentence can often weigh a Irving, or a Brown, maybe even a Raynd) and I have found a great deal of mention of this slow metamorphosis.

"No, I never escaped, and even the limits of my region were unknown to me. But I felt they were far away. But this feeling was based on nothing serious, it was a simple feeling. For if my region had ended no furhter than my feet could carry me, surely I would have felt it change slowly. For regions do not suddenly end, as far as I know, but gradually merge into one another. And I never noticed anything of the kind, but however far I went, and no matter in what direction, it was always the same sky, always the same earth." (60)

"and the cycle continues, joltingly, of flight and bivouac, in an Egypt without bounds, without infant, without mother." (61)

"Or perhaps it was I who was changing, why not?" (70)

with this quoting, I must go on, I can't go on* this book is peppered with the profound, the hilarious, the depressing and the uplifting.

So all this really has had me thinking, and it had us talking last night about what it means to metaphor, to reincarnate...and what metamorphosis Molly is making to Moran? maybe. And how this pertains to Eliot ( I unfortunately do not have a copy yet, but I will soon-this has been a great thorn in me.) To many passages in T.S. Eliot I could conjure, but several come to mind, namely the one Sarah spoke about, "Old fire to ashes, and ashes to the earth/ Which is already flesh, fur and faeces/ Bones of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf."..."Dung and death"
As Molloy is deteriorating in body and mind, he is making this gradual transformation, his metamorphosis, one rotten plank at a time he is become a new Ship. Like Eliot here, the time of flesh follows a linear pattern, but life itself and time out of our context is anything but linear. we shall all die, but we continue on: fire to ashes, ashes to earth, Always the same sky, always the same earth.

At what point in our transformation to we cease to be? Like the ship is there a point that we do cease? or could it be we forever undergo a series of merging? and with that shall never cease, rather forever continue?

Twenty Minute Lifetime

The inner light...well that was my virginal Star Trek experience, and it was, as I heard other students proclaiming, "horribly cheesy" but the ideas at hand, are really what captivated me, (as well as the flute jams ) I started to think about this idea of experiencing an entire life within the frame of 20 minutes, and whether or not this is possible, whether or not this has happened to me.
Sometime later, I concluded several things:
no, I have never experienced a lifetime in twenty minutes as Captin Jean luc picard has as I have never been beamed by a space probe.
and Star Trek, though apparently steeped in advanced literary themes, is still a waste of ones time.
I did realize though, that beyond any dream I have had, beyond any potentially illicit experience I may or may not have eaten.
that the closest I have come to experiencing an entire lifetime, in the whole body sense, emotionally, spiritually, physically, and even in some ways sensually --its not that weird --Is during the intimate moments I have felt with extraordinary books. I mean this truthfully, it took some time to conclude this, but I have realized, and I have felt the attachment, the engrossment the complete rapture* with many novels. and it is an experience, on par though never quite comparable with life, with love and the act of loving. Everyday I realize more and more I am becoming a nerd, that I am falling in love with literature, but with that realization comes the understanding that literature is the only thing (aside from your life, girlfriends, family, friends etc) worth loving. It is a love of the superficial, but it is the only superficial thing of any worth.

Not only does the term Literature encompass virtually all that there is in the world in its many genres ect, but a simple book, about say a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, can span lifetimes of understandings, emotions, and philosophies. Though not necessarily twenty minutes, but perhaps, I have found that entering the novel, is the closest we can come to entering the lives of others, to experiencing a lifetime within our own (unless being john malkovich is a possibility) I think back on some of the works that, like the star trek, popped my literary cherry and i am drawn to many, but most importantly, the one that, thus far i have been fully devoted, and incorporated into in body and soul would be Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, Though Sometimes a Great Notion got me rolling, Lonesome Dove stole my heart


*I have for a while been really into this word rapture to describe my affinity towards literature, and it has stemmed from James' blog last semester of the same title.

Colonel Aureliano Buendia organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. he had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty-five. he survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse. He refused the Order of Merit, which the President of the Republic awarded him. He rose to be Commander-in-Chief of the revolution army forces with jurisdiction and command from one border to the other, and the man most feared by the government, but he never let himself be photographed. He declined the lifetime pension offered him after the war and until old age he made his living from the little gold fishes that he manufactured in his workshop in Macondo. Although he always fought at the head of his mean, the only wound that he received was the one he gave himself after signing the Treaty of Neerlandia, which put an end to almost twenty years of civil war. He shot himself in the chest with a pistol and the bullet came out through his back without damaging any vital organ. the only thing left of all that was a street that bore his name in Macondo. And ye, as he declared a few years before the hied of old age, he had not expected any of that on the dawn he left with his twenty-one men to join the forces of General Victorio Medina.

logicians lothe and poets love

Alright. So my "page" in Finnegans Wake was chosen at random in class the other day when the list was being passed around, i just opened the book to 427, and I thought oh, that's strange 4/27 being my birthday. then in my head I was thinking for Joyce it would be 27/4 right? day-month year. A couple days later I just happened to open up to page 274, and i went 19 lines down, 88 letters into that line... and there is the word born, pg.274 19 88 my birthday, 27/4/1988.

I have awoken.

in rapture

I, for a long time now have been wishing for more hours to the day. I do not regret any day really, rather I long for their lengthening. This applies here too. I really wish I had more time to do homework- My first through 12th grade, even several years into college self would kick my own ass for saying this- but I have been infected. As much reading as I consume I find myself in turn consumed. I speak here in limitations, though there seem to be no limits to this curse, because I am (can) only speak of Samuel Beckett in respect to time. I know we are in the middle of Finnegans Wake and it need not be mentioned the devour-power of that book, or the lecture (again-rapture) Ben Lubner gave us and will continue to give us tomorrow.
But Beckett has shanghied me and I see no end in sight. This was my first experience with Beckett, i've never read Gudot ( i dont think i even know how to spell it) Dr. Sexson initally really turned me off this book, i was telling people how horrible it was before i even read it, but i found it to be everything the contrary. It is though horrible. I must add this. But morbidity does not weigh heavy, though the text is itself beyond dense.
Its not really even possible to convey my infatuation with this book. I have never in my life. Never in my life, underlined as many passages, noted as many pages, and found myself as consumed between his mere periods (.) as i have with Beckett. I will post many if not all of these passages at another time. As with Nabokov, i am compelled to simply rewrite the book in its entirety, but i will limit myself to a select few. for there are many times when I would really stop, to laugh, well up(nearly) with tears as Doug has, or literally gasp because i felt as though i am granted admission to a radiance of poetics, unsurpassed by my knowledge.
You know those little quips they print on tea-bags. or in fortune cookies (this book is compiled of them!) -though often will-breakingly morose-
We should be reading Molloy in our tea, or at the end of a meal that (in Montana) will inevitably make you ill!
I don't want to sound like I'm just making shit up here. Maybe its because I went from Haroun (and a John Irving novel before that) to Molloy. but I am truly in rapture with this book with this writer.
between this an Lolita, i can't really recommend any more books to people (unless i know they'll get them)

-to add

of course just after i published my last blog, and just before i'm about to close down the library, I read yet another blog that I wish i had time to talk about. but because I have no time and it speaks better for itself than i can.
for what its worth: a shout out to jennie-lynn. I dig that mudra

Musings while at work

To start, I would have to say that by and large the reasons why I regard Dr. Sexon's classes so highly, are not limited to himself and teachings alone, but that we are subject to such a plethora of awesome literature, and I use the term outside of the language of chaos, meaning I am indeed in awe. And this applies in equal part to what books we are assigned as to the blogs of my peers. and i mean this of all the blogs, but It is hard to speak to each one.
Sam and Rio for example- I don't even know where to begin.
But reading a couple of the most recently posted
Doug- To start: i've been there. To continue: I'm both honored and enticed that you'd share your experience, that something that's very intimate, but I feel that this class, if any is the proper place to be so. You're able to convey something that is almost impossible to put into words the term 'experience' is undermining for what actually takes place. I like that you mention the Bhagavad Gita. Is this still a text for capstone? (i wish i was in that class) because when reading this I would say i felt the experience more as clearly as i had read it. When Arjuna is speaking with Krishna, to show the Man that all is already written, he shows his true self, as self that encapsulates all things of the past things of the future, all is written and all is destined. -This being a rough summary of what is said. ( i would really advise reading it) but the idea at hand is much the same as I would suspect Doug's vision, and the idea of the eternal return in General. The mass of the cosmos is entirely infinite, cyclical, it is the Mobius strip and it is the forever fractal. To quote the Bhagvad Gita:
If the radiance of a thousand suns Were to burst at once into the sky That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one... I am become Death, The shatterer of Worlds.

Or to return to our old omnipotent buddy Ovid:
All things change, nothing is extinguished... There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; teh ages themselves glide by in constant movement.


- To James: I honestly could not distinguish where Finnegan began, and again where it fin. I'm not sure if this was intend, maybe i'm just loosing it from trying to read this book and being numbed by work, but your retelling of tossing around Finnegan made me laugh (out loud-i and the rest of the cal library did notice this), think, and actual open up the book to see where your voice came in. I've had very similar experiences, but i dont think i could have conveyed them quite the same.

Makin' copies

Ok, so when we were asked to write a blog in the "iff" style, i remembered an old clip from SNL
I have found though, that due to copyright it is almost impossible to view any SNL clips online. But i have found a way...sort of,
This is arguably from one of the best known clips from SNL days- when they were funny- and when Rob Schnieder was funny...sort of. so check it out, the "Richmeister, or Makin' Copies
follow my directions

click this link: Richmeister- Makin Copies
then without actually clicking on anything, drag the mouse over to the clip on the right. do not click, just listen.

كتاب

this is arbitrary, but on page 88 when they discuss the Pages of cup
"our pages are organized into Chapters and Volumes. Each Volume is headed by a Font, or Title, Page; and up there is the leader of the entire "Library", which is our name for the army- General Kitab Himself"
anyways, being a proud student of MSU elementary Arabic, Kitab is one of the words i actually know- it means Book.
that's it.

كتاب

Harun and the sea of blogs

I can't believe another semester has stared, I'm still trying to catch up on my Nabokov and keep up with the continuing blogs, but now that we have all this fresh material I fear my attention is deviating. So many of the class mates have already begun to blog or have finished the book (I'm close but...) and already we're awash with new ideas and insights. In relation to Sam's blog specifically, and I'm sure on a lot of people's minds is this distinction between highbrow and low.

Sam ask if the label is based on who you are. And i think that may be true,
but I also believe that it might be more in depth that it is not only Who you are, but How you are. How you choose to look at a text. And this obviously can vary form person to person, but i can also very within the person individually, we can choose to which pair of glasses we wear when reading any text, as we looked at in lit crit, we saw an array of text through an array of filters (feminists, Marxist...) and beyond that, and more relatable to this class we struggled, but succeded in observing texts through a slideshow of lenses ranging from literal (literally) to Anagoic (which interestingly enough comes from the Greek word to climb or ascend)
Now whether or not all works of literature are worthy (see Dan Drown) , or would even appear under the agangoic spectrum (or even the one below that if I could remember its name) We can see that even some of the most pedantic works can be considered High Brow when observed keenly. Take for example the film Dumb and Dumber, dumb-no doubt, but radiantly brilliant when explored and exposed. And as Sam has showed us, our first example of "lowbrow" as already been exposed by the author and his critics to be far more than a children story.
Now I know that there are exceptions to this rule, and there expectational examples as well Finnegan's Wake clearly one of them. "learned reader (whose eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald head)" -V.N.
But my understanding of it, which could very well be just wrong entirely, is that its not a matter of the book belonging to an esoteric circle, rather the circle of readers, or a subculture-circle of readers, a distilled audience should be esoteric in their understanding.


note: the picture above is, I think a type of broccoli but its more importantly a natural fractal. For whatever reason -tune in turn on...maybe?- fractals are the visual image I always conjure when trying to understand this concept of the anagogic ladder, because the concept is so far from anything linear, instead its ever evolving and in many ways indefinable...its hard to explain. natty psychedelic literature I guess.