A semester later...at the same point

I realize I haven't utilized this blog since my class ended, and I'm not quite sure what to do with it. But I have some free time and would like to use this space to reflect on the end my semester. I have one more final, an English paper, but that's not due for a few days.
I thank God that I made it through this semester and managed to keep my grades relatively intact. Between my dad having a heart attack and some haunting personal demons popping back up, it's definitely been trying. I am exceeding grateful for the volunteer opportunities I have been given this semester. These have not only given me the chance the serve others, but they also gave me a non-frivolous study break. Of course, the Dead, Janis, and Symphony of Science (really glad I discovered that) have also been a major help to keeping me sane over the semester and especially the past week.
I am disgruntled that my final exams have stolen the first days of winter from me. I did not get to properly enjoy the first snows; the glass panes of the IC separated us. I am getting to enjoy the cold, though. The lake is beautiful, and the wind invigorating. Despite missing the snow, Nature showed it's grace to me in other ways. On my way to the library, I had to see the lake for just a minute before I locked myself away in the stacks. I know the construction of the IC is supposed to make it unobtrusive, but you can't really experience the lake unless you are standing next to it, hearing, smelling, feeling the wind and the water crash into and over each other, performing their ballet of power. Anyway, I was going to lake, passing by the chapel, and there was some sort of precipitation (snow/ice) hitting my face, surrounded by the wind swirling through the arches of the walkway, and all of a sudden....a rabbit darts by! It was absolutely amazing. It was such an awesome moment and reminded me of all the beautiful little things that happen every day. It took me out of my finals funk and brought me back to reality.
Now all I have to do is write this paper, meet the cat sitter, and go home. I go back to my job two days after I get back, and I can't wait. I'm ready to leave the finals stress mode behind and kick into retail work at Christmas time stress! It may still be stress, but it's different stress, and I'll take it. Just riding the wave of change.....

On a slightly more personal, and longer, note

At 1:39 this afternoon, I officially survived finals week! I usually spend most of my time in the library during the semester, but over the past week and a half I pitched a tent. I lived out of vending machines and the 7-11; I ingested caffeine in any form I could get my hands on. I accosted people for hot chocolate. I even pondered a cigarette a few times, despite having quit 2 years ago, while stumbling through the wreathing smoke lingering outside of the IC at 4 AM. I watched the sun rise over Lake Michigan from the IC twice. I listened to hours of Counting Crows, Jakob Dylan, and Iron & Wine to drown out the screaming, running, nervous breakdowns, and weeping that filled the IC. I fell down the rabbit-hole of ever increasing paranoia that I was going to miss a final, culminating with jumping out of bed at 7:58 this morning, convinced I had missed my 1:00 PM exam. But I’ve made it through! I’m done, and still have some sanity intact. That it itself is awesome enough, but the passing of this week also marks the passing of my first year at LUC. It’s reflecting on this fact that blows my mind.
I was worrying about my philosophy grade while studying for my statistics exam (I’m a multitasking obsessive). I will most likely get a B in my philosophy course, despite the fact that both times I watched the sun rise were related to that course. This bothers me because somehow I’ve managed to avoid getting a B yet. I really, really don’t want one. I like the streamlined appearance of As. They are nice and neat, while Bs are grotesque, bulging bobbles. Anyway, I was thinking about this grade, and I remembered how much of an accomplishment it even is for me to be at Loyola. When I dropped out of high school, I still planned to go to college. After I got my GED and the years started piling up, I tried to accept the fact that I was never going to make it. I was working two jobs to support myself and my family; there was no way I could go to college. I couldn’t quit my jobs, and I would probably just fail anyway. Two years later, I got the opportunity to go to community college. When it came time to transfer to a four-year college, I applied to Loyola on a whim. I never thought I would get in; and if I did, there was never any way I could afford it. I was accepted, and received five letters asking me to send my financial aid information. I never sent it because Loyola was my “lottery school”. If I won the lottery, I would go. Eventually, I sent it off for some reason or another, and they gave me most of the financial aid I needed. I packed up my life and my cat, got in a van with my parents and came to Chicago to see if I could get the last bit of funding I needed to attend Loyola. The meeting with the financial aid counselor would determine whether the van went home with me or without me. Amazingly, it all worked out. I haven’t fallen flat on my face. So yeah, I might get a B. I still don’t want one; but I think it’s pretty damn awesome that I even made it this far. Thank you, God. Now I just have to figure out what I’m going to do with myself for the next week!

Keats' Epistle

Hello, Ancient Marinere. This poetical letter opening reads like what the life of the wedding guest in Coleridge’s "Rime" would become. He has seen too far into the darkness of life, and that sorrow haunts him forever.

I completely understand this during the current state of affairs. Every day in the news, another horrible tragedy has occurred. People are killing their families, themselves, and their neighbors. I understand that tough economic crimes breed more crime and hopelessness, but this seems like a new level of violence. These are seemingly average people (like always) that appear to just snap. I know it’s like throwing your back out; hefting that laptop didn’t actually throw your back out, but it was the final straw on multiple strains. It’s still fairly distressing to realize that a father can get to the point where killing his entire family seems like a better option than losing the house, or a mother can become so angry at her husband that she decides to retaliate by killing their children. Why? What in our culture teaches people that death is better than poverty, or violence is an appropriate response to feeling powerless? Is it even a cultural issue, or a primitive trigger that gets tripped? As the poem illustrates, in nature, the more powerful prey on the less powerful. It’s the darker side of the ecosystem. However, as “higher” animals, we are supposed to have better control over these things. Yet, the cycle still exists, just in other terms. Instead of active violence towards the poor, the more powerful (i.e. wealthy) just prey on them through economic oppression. Then, in their powerlessness, the impoverished turn to violence against the only people they have power over: their families.

A blog of randomness

I’m studying Marx in my philosophy class. This is not my first exposure to Marx, as my father is a Marx fan, and we joke about me being a “red-diaper baby”. It is, however, my first time studying him in-depth. Hearing things like “man creates, through his labor, a world he experiences as his own” struck me as similar to the Romantic idea of humans “creating the world”. The fact that my English class immediately precedes my philosophy class also may be why these connections popped up in my head. In my curiosity, I ran across this quote from Marx at the Marx archive. I totally believe this, despite the fact that I occasionally experience Shelley as a loquacious, whiny ass. Occasionally.
Keats, on the other hand, is one of my favorite Romantic poets. He and Coleridge are in a close race. I especially enjoy "Ode to a Nightingale" because it seems to me like Keats turns the poem into a tomb. It has the overt references to death and dying, but also the gloom and the darkness of the surroundings envelop the speaker like a coffin. He even refers to the “embalmed darkness” which, while meaning perfumed, I don’t think is generally associated with anything other than burial/preservation preparations. There are also the purple violets and the purple wine, a color of death. Unlike Shelley’s skylark, in whose flight “the pale purple even/melts” or overcomes death, Keats’ bird lulls him into a sleep/dream/death-like state.
One last side note: I was reading through poetry and "Christabel" and "Lamia" gave me crazy dreams. Crazy, crazy dreams. It also made me think that these poems may have inspired the bit in the last Harry Potter book with the giant snake bursting forth from the old lady.

No vacancy

Watching the “Powers of Ten” and reading the last lines of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” reminded me of an article I read about the Hubble Telescope discovering a new planet. The telescope snapped a picture of it 10 years ago, but it was hidden from view by the glare of the star in front of it. Scientists figured out a way to get around this and were able to see a gas giant, 3 times the size of Jupiter. I thought about this giant planet hurtling along an orbit somewhere, and the image of our own startlingly beautiful Milky Way, and it makes absolutely no sense that we could be the only beings in the universe. It would be a waste of matter and form. However, when we look to the stars, the vacuum of space can seem like only “silence and solitude” and therefore “vacancy”. This is somewhat like the old tree falling in the woods question. I think in the fast-paced modern world people are afraid of silence because it reminds them of death. It is as if life must be boisterous and loud and “in-your-face” to really be life. Your relaxation time must be just as filled as your work time, or else you’re wasting it. But life is waiting to be discovered in the vacancy of the moment. These are the flashes of stillness that allow you to hear your heartbeat; the seconds of solitude when you catch the faintest whisper of the breeze lazily sliding through the leaves, making them murmur to one another in voices just low enough to make it seem like an imagining. The silence can sometimes be the only reminder that you are alive, and not just an automaton, rushing, rushing, rushing, towards death.

On a Lark

I find the last lines of Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” to be slightly egotistical. He’s essentially saying “Give me the knowledge of your joy, and I will be a great poet that the world must hear”. It seems focused on what the poet can get out of the relationship with this unseen bird. It’s also kind of odd that he specifically says “Teach me” even just some of the happiness “thy brain must know”. These are words that describe thought and processes that can be learned, not emotion and feeling. This represents the human struggle between the dichotomy of the heart and the mind that the bird does not encounter. It knows and feels, equally, only joy. In earlier lines, the human emotion is besmirched by thought; the deepest joy is still affected by some long forgotten moment of sadness. Alternately, if we never felt pain, we still would not reach the heights of joy that the bird experiences. It has been my understanding in all things that if you have not felt the opposite experience, then your appreciation for the experience is not as acute. Someone who has never experienced the depths of despair has a different experience of euphoria than someone who has traversed through the darkness to emerge into the light. Overall, balance is necessary. Balance between joy and sadness, thought and emotion. Without balance, the “harmonious madness” is just madness, whether it’s someone becoming so focused on their misery that they harm others, or someone so caught up in chasing joy that they harm themselves.

"They wrote it all down to the progress of man"

I’ve always enjoyed Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” because of the vivid descriptions. He uses his words as paint to create an illustration within the mind. It gives hope to those of us that struggle to translate the images in our heads into something tangible to share with others. If I can’t paint it, I might be able to write it.
Beyond that, I like the message within the poem. The Mariner indiscriminately kills a bird, leading to a curse on him and the death of all his shipmates. The curse only begins to lift when he finds it in himself to rejoice in and bless the natural life around him. The poem also ends with this moral:
“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small:
For the dear God, who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”
I think this is pretty relevant in a time global warming and destruction. If you kill nature, you kill humanity. People are starting to decide that focusing on the human toll of climate change will force people to recognize the need for change; I say that if people don’t care about the toll it’s taking on animals, they cannot care about the toll it is taking on humans. As part of the same creation, if you lack the capacity to care about one, you lack the capacity to care about the other. Of course, not caring about other humans leads to things like wars fought for control of oil, which devastate both humans and the environment. The oil then contributes to climate change, furthering devastating humans and nature, until more is required, necessitating the start of another fraudulent war. It's a self-perpetuating cycle, but not fueled by hate. Instead, it's fueled by apathy and greed. The destruction is a side effect of greed, and the apathy allows it to be called progress.

Same problems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes in “The Nightingale” that man has forced his own sorrow on the song of the nightingale. In reality, according to the poem, the bird is quite cheerful, blissfully warbling away, content with its avian existence. In other words, Coleridge has rejected one projection of human emotion on the nightingale in favor of his own projection of emotion. This returns to Wordworth’s idea of “half perception half creation” of nature, but I’m still struggling with this. I understand the idea that on some level we must project ourselves onto the things around us in order to be able to effectively forge a connection with those things, but where is the line between putting an element of yourself into things in order to experience them and just being self-centered? If I have a hand in partially creating everything, doesn’t that mean to some extent that everything revolves around me? That seems incredibly self-absorbed. If I have partially created everything around me, then the world exists to serve me. Therefore, I am entitled to the things I desire and need. Where do other people exist in this picture? What about the fulfillment of their wants and needs? If the fulfillment of their wants/needs leaves less resources for me, should I begrudge them that fulfillment, or worse, even try to stop it? It seems to me that this type of thinking leads directly to the Madoff and AIG bonuses mess. I want it, and if I don’t have it, I’ll just take it from other people.

Phish in Nature

I did a lot of traveling over my break. I flew into Charlotte, and got a lovely view of the melting snow from the freak storm they had the day before. I drove to Charleston and watched Spanish moss, hanging from the giant trees growing over graves, swaying in the light breeze. My break ended in Richmond, where I was surprised by the vestiges of fall that still clung, as multi-colored leaves, to the deciduous trees as we rolled on towards spring. All of my experiences of observing nature and the world around me culminated, as did my break, with the Phish reunion at Hampton Coliseum on Saturday.
I love Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” because it is the acknowledgement of the things I abhor about modern humanity. People are so focused on consuming and making sure they get their fair share that they miss everything else around them. They are only aware of themselves and their needs. This is also why I love Phish concerts. It is impossible to be “out of tune”. In the explosion of sound and people, there is a unity that sneaks up on you in the middle of a huge jam, when you catch the lights and the rhythm in just the right way. The commonality between you and the hundreds of people surrounding you gently dawns on you in a break in the crowd when you can see straight to the band on stage. You didn't come from the same place and are going different places, but for the moment you are all sharing one experience, and fundamentally the same. It’s not quite the same as experiencing the joy of nature contained in a miniature rosebud or the power revealed in a raging storm, but it is a glimpse into the nature of humanity.

"Tintern Abbey" and Time

I find it interesting that “Lyrical Ballads” beings with "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" and ends with "Lines written a few miles about Tintern Abbey". Both are incredibly long poems. "Rime" is fantastical and supernatural, while "Tintern Abbey" seems to be based on an experience of Wordsworth. They are distinctly works of their respective writers. Despite the collaborative bond, and the fact that Wordsworth contributed to the premise, I don’t think Wordsworth could have written “Rime”. His mind seemed too rooted in the natural world to delve that far into the supernatural. These poems are the opposite poles of Romantic poetry; but, I get the same feeling from both poems. I don't think Wordsworth necessarily intended this, yet at the end of the poem I am struck by melancholy. The speaker has accepted the changes in his life and the landscape over the years, and is even glad for some of them. However, even embracing change does not lighten the realization that youth has gone and only death and separation lie ahead. Long after the speaker is gone and eventually forgotten, change will still come to his landscape. His memories have been left hanging in the air, but below them the river will turn and the green recede. Sometimes I find myself wanting my memories to hang in the space where I created them, so I can return to the place/person/time unchanged and unaffected by the future events that have transpired between then and now and then. I think this is related to a universal rumination of choices made and the never-ending desire to be able to undo mistakes. Perhaps with the Singularity and other technological progress (like that time machine someone must be building) this will be realized. If we did have the ability to leave everything as we remembered, waiting for our return, would it be worth it? Is stagnation really more comforting than change?

Perception

My English professor for Brit Lit II gave us a list of Romantic Elements. As I was reading the Wordsworth assignments for this week, I ran across the line “In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts/Bring sad thoughts to the mind”. It reminded me a lot of a line from one of my favorite bands, Counting Crows: “The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings” from “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby”. After pondering it for awhile, it seems to me that the Counting Crows body of work fits Dr. Akers 7 elements of Romanticism. I will have to dig her list out and fully compare.
The other thing that struck me while reading Wordsworth was an area where he and Blake seemed to diverge. I have serious issues with Blake’s “where man is not, nature is barren” as I don’t believe that nature is devoid of inherent value removed from humanity. Wordsworth doesn’t seem to believe that, either, as in lines like “their thoughts I cannot measure” concerning birds. The line points to the birds having some experience outside of humanity. This contradicts Blake’s notion of man essentially creating nature through his imagining of it. If nature is man’s imagination, it cannot exist outside of humanity. Wordsworth, however, puts nature in the position of having something to teach man, a wisdom beyond man’s knowledge aquired through books and manmade things. Despite this difference, Blake and Wordsworth seem to agree on the way the human mind can warp man’s perception of nature. The speaker in “The Tables Turned” expresses that thoughts turn the beauty of nature to hideousness and one’s heart must be open in order to learn from nature. This line of thinking is similar to Blake’s idea that most people’s perception of nature is corrupted and dark, which taints nature, and if their imagination was purged of this corruption, their entire relation to nature and life around them would change for the better. It is interesting that they can share this point, but differ on their fundamental ideas of the purpose of nature.

Wordsworth's view of life

I really enjoy the writings of Wordsworth because of his perception of life and society. "Lines left upon a seat in a Yew-tree" demonstrates the folly of pride and the importance of humility, while Harry Gill gets exactly what he deserves. "Simon Lee" illustrates the importance of good deeds and their effect on others, and "We are Seven" demonstrates perfectly the innocent understanding of a child compared to the jaded ideas of an adult. "Seven" and "Yew-tree" both seem to share Blake's idea that the perception of the young is the most pure. "Seven" shows a young girl's keen insistence that her two dead siblings still count as part of her family, while an adult tries to tell her otherwise. She refuses to acquiesce, because she still plays on their graves and interacts with them. The man in "Yew-tree" begins his journey innocent and idealistic, but as he becomes experienced his idealism turns to the cement of pride and contempt for his fellow man. He is so convinced that his notions are better that he becomes isolated. In his isolation, he cannot carry out his ideas at all, and sits idly by as his life slips into oblivion.
This man reminds me of an ongoing discussion with my father about the splintering of the Left. I am a die-hard lefty, especially concerning the environment. However, I was recently struck by what I feel is the proliferation of elitist, bourgeois terms in the movement. A simple word no longer will suffice to describe an action; a five-word phrase with 3 syllable words, ending in "Justice" is absolutely necessary. I'm not talking about the eloquence of our newly elected president, I'm talking about the mission statements of the myriad of lefty groups. I feel this is alienating people and also making an anti-elitist movement elitist. The other problem is the sheer number of Leftist groups. Like the man who isolates himself and therefore can't accomplish anything, the Left becomes so splintered that it starts to lose the ability to do anything. Eco-feminism is an example of both of these problems. I'm an environmentalist; I'm a feminist. I don't feel like I need a whole new label to identify myself and to splinter off from both of these movements; although, what an awesome, insider, elite label it is! It may seem like a combination of ideas, but combinations have to be made from beginning wholes, which end up fractured in the process. Something about eggs and omelets, I think....

Exploitation

The two "Chimney Sweeper" poems by Blake are both powerful. The first one, told by a child young enough to still have a lisp, equates the innocent children with the innocence of the lambs previously found in Blake's poems. It also ends with the societal lie that injustice, hardship, and exploitation should merely be endured, because rewards lie in the eternal life beyond all misery. The second one, which emphasizes the "THE" at the beginning, as if to imply this the true, real chimney sweeper, exposes the deplorable conditions of the young chimney sweepers. In the child's mind, because he was happy and full of life, society had to break him and fill him with sorrow and death. The illustration does not even look like a child, but a beast. There is also the juxtaposition between white and black occurring in both poems. In the first, the soot turns the child's white hair black, and in the second, the blackened child is surrounded by the white snow. The soot blackening the child's hair is symbolic of outside society stealing the child's innocence, while the soot-covered child illustrates that the purity is no longer within the child, but only existing outside of it in nature. The snow is untouched by the societal demands and perceptions that have chained the child, and which could be symbolically washed away by the snow, as water washes away soot.
I like these poems because aside from Blake's perceptions of reality and society and the chains humans intertwine around these things, I always saw these two specifically as speaking against the horrors of industrial society. The exploitation of the innocent is one of the worst aspects of an industrial, capitalistic society. Even though we have mainly have stamped out child labor in the United States, it still persists in other countries. We also still have to deal with labor issues and class exploitation of adults in this country. However, I am hopeful that our new President will continue to "bolster labor" and examine the evils of capitalism and unnecessary consumption that have led us down this dark rabbit hole of recession and depression.

Creation and Religion

I am going to expound on "The Garden of Love", but first I feel the need to backtrack a little to "The Lamb". When our professor, Dr. Jones, was discussing this poem, he pointed out that Blake unifies the Creator aspect of the Trinity with Christ the Lamb. Dr. Jones felt this did not fully fit with Trinitarian doctrine; however, I disagree. I didn't realize this until I was looking at this icon I got for Christmas. It clearly shows Christ in the Creator aspect. In Orthodox Christianity, which happens to be my particular brand, Christ is the Creator, the Lamb, everything. The Trinity is fully united from before the beginning of time.
Now, "The Garden of Love" symbolizes the movement from innocence to experience. Blake not only continues with the Eden theme, but also the movement from childhood to adulthood, and the confinement that society forces upon adults. He uses religion to illustrate this. The area where the children played has now been replaced by a chapel, with "Thou shalt not" written on the lintel. The innocent carefree play of childhood has been replaced by the demands to conformity within societal bounds. Attempting to turn away from these demands, and return to innocence, symbolized by the simplistic beauty of nature, the speaker looks for the flowers that used to grow in the garden. Instead, he finds death, which is the ultimate end to all those who allow their innocence of perception to be distorted by the experienced perception of others. The priests in the poem serve this role of imposing their perception of the world on the speaker, by denying him his happiness with their regulations. The briars, along with the image below the line, can also refer to Christ's crown of thorns. This is where I get slightly confused on Blake's perception of Christianity. It may be because he is coming out of some sort of dissenting Protestantism, which generally has Calvinistic veins of happiness equating with sin. In my understanding of Christianity, it does not exist to damn you for your joy, but instead seeks to magnify your joy through the love of God and joyfulness in all of creation. The canons of the religion confine human desire, but only those desires that ulitmately lead to unhappiness. Even though Blake is focused on the individuality of perception and reality, he cannot be advocating pure hedonism, because the Dionysisian demands of humanity would take precedence over the stewardship of nature. Without some sort of agreed upon societal perception of right and wrong, each individual would merely be chasing their own desires, regardless of the harm to fellow man or nature, and all innocence would be lost.

Blake's Nudity

William Blake's illustrations for "The Lamb", "The Little Girl Lost", and "The Little Girl Found" all involve humans in various states of dress. The boy in "The Lamb" is naked, as are the children and adult frolicking at the end of "The Little Girl Found". However, Lyca and her mother are clothed in "The Little Girl Lost" and the first illustration of "The Little Girl Found". Blake's use of nudity seems to imply a state of innocence, purity, and natural being. Hence, Lyca's mother is clothed because she has lost her innocence in the transition to motherhood, and will soon experience the sorrow this transformation so often carries with it. Lyca also is clothed, but the lioness releases her of the clothing that binds her to the human world, the world of experience and pain, before carrying her off to reunite her with the natural world. At the end of the poem, which I always perceived as Lyca's parents joining her in death, all are depicted in a natural state of nudity, having returned to an innocent, painless, carefree state.
Modern American society has an extremely different view of nudity. It does not represent innocence or purity, and is most certainly not natural. In Columbia, South Carolina, where I used to live, there was a news story a few months ago about a mother who was told by Wal-Mart employees to stop breastfeeding her child in a public area of the store. Several comments on the story pointed out that Wal-Mart is a "family store" and young children might be exposed to the indecency of a bare breast. Breastfeeding is a completely natural action; humans have evolved to feed their young this way. However, Americans have come to understand all nudity as having a sexual bent. If a child sees a women breastfeeding and is told to look away, the child grasps that something is "naughty" about nakedness. That child eventually has to confront their own nakedness (it can't be escaped) and may wonder what is so wrong about them, about their body. This is why a majority of Americans have body image and self-esteem problems. From a young age, they are exposed to the idea that their natural state is something shameful, to be hidden away. Although, since most people can't quite figure out why they have this uneasy feeling about their naked appearance, they start to think it's because their hips are too big, or their waist is not proportionate, and endeavor to somehow change this. Thus, the plastic surgery and diet businesses boom, but people still don't quite seem happy with themselves.

Blake

It may be because I read Blake's Songs of Experience first, many years ago, but every time I read poems from Songs of Innocence a sense of foreboding comes through the words. As I read, I am waiting for the other shoe to drop, the innocence to be shattered and become experience. This feeling is similar to the sense of inevitability felt by those of us who frequent isolated alleys at night. However, the sense of anticipation in Blake's words are not merely based on some intuitive sense dropping lead into a dull pit of the stomach, but can be read and heard in his tangible words.
For instance, the "Introduction" seems light-hearted enough, full of merriment and mirth. Nonetheless, there is weeping mentioned. The second reference is clearly to tears of happiness ("wept with joy"); yet, the first is somewhat ambiguous. Here, before the book is even fully begun, is an intermingling of sorrow and joy. Likewise, "The Shepherd" has a joyful existence, full of wandering and sweet lambs. Then Blake throws in the word "watchful", implying there are things threatening enough to be watched for beyond this blithe herd. Finally, "The Ecchoing Green" ends with the day and the "darkening Green". The children's play is over; the darkness now descends.