'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.