Thursday, November 17, 2005
Ishmaelitis
Don't be offended. But if you are, it's nothing personal.
My experiences with christianity and most christians have led me into viewing both this specific religions religious institutions and their practitioners as largely a waste. My earliest experiences with christianity(beyond being baptised) were of church. My earliest memory in a church was of one around the corner from where we lived when my parents moved to NYC. We lived on what was then a crack street. I guess you could call this a crack church. My memory is of feeling bored and antcy while sitting on the bench next to my mother. I saw some kids in a nearby row making paper airplanes. I thought I'd give it a try. Those kids were a little older than me and they could tear paper into better squares for airplanes than I could. I distinctly remember how my hands couldn't tear the paper along straight lines. The paper tore so easily. I made a few folds and thought my airplane might work but I figured I should show it to my mother first. She was really mad at me, and not for ignoring the sermon(lecture). No one had ever explained to me that bibles were important and that it's paper you don't use to make paper airplanes.
I have always enjoyed paper airplanes. My mom used to work in a building at Columbia University with a huge rotundum(think big round room). My dad and I would make paper airplanes and throw them off the second story to see how they would fly while waiting for my mom to finish with work. The transition from flat into 3 dimensional, from useless to productive, this was fascinating to me. How can I ask for more in life than the gift to create something that is out of something that is not? This is very much how literature works. Flat paper with print on it means nothing until we breath life into it, through the physical(paper airplanes) or the imaginative(reading). My first memory of a church is of this imagination process, as I was capable of expressing to my fullest, being shut down. I'm sure I was punished in some idiotic fassion(my parents have never been as creative as me). My imagination had been stomped on and this has remained the main theme of christianity in my life.
Kindergarden found me in a church school. I was in the last grade. My memories of this year are somewhat fragment. Only the interesting ones have survived with all the details intact. I remember accidentaly stapling a piece of paper to my finger and running around the room screaming wildly in terror while avoiding the scary adults chasing me. I didn't know they only wanted to help. I can lead a pretty good chase. Haven't you ever wondered what a staple in the fleshy meaty part of your thumb would feel like? In restrospect, it's only worth it if people chase you because you can wave your arms and the paper makes cool motions in the air while you run.
The next 8 years I would spend at another church-type school. But it was a big one. Apparently, cathedrals are bigger and somehow more important than regular churches. I guess any building can become a church if you consecrate it. Cathedrals have stricter archatectural, social, or religious rules. I don't know why they're more important but they just are. I haven't figured that one out yet. By now I had also started reading actual books. Barensteine Bear books were wonderful. Once the magic of literature was unlocked to me, I read every day. Over and over and over I would read those Barensteine Bear books. Even if I was reading a book I had previously read 50 times, each time I read those books was important. Each time was fresh. Each time held something new for me. Somewhere in a combination of words and pictures was a limmitless universe I can still enter today. It is the limmitless universe of the Barensteine Bears. I would even read at night. My parents would want time at night to unwind from their busy hectic days and put me to bed, in part, to get some quiet. So I'd demand the hall light be kept on "to keep away the monsters"(which still periodicly show up) and read by that. It would hurt to read at night so I'd rotate my reading by keeping one eye shut. This is why today I wear glasses and the perscription for my eyes is uneven. Every time I see or wear my glasses, I am connected with my love for reading. While typing this sentance right now, I've removed my glasses and the blury text appearing on the computer screen can, with some imagination, be turned into words from one of my favorite Barensteine Bears books. Once it's with you, it never leaves. It's not even a heart beat away. It IS your heart beat. Note: Draw a connection between growth in reading, growth in religious institution, paper is the binding agent.
This new grade school of mine has been strongest academic environment I've ever encountered. Most of the college professors I've had in my 6 years at MSU present about as much information as I would recieve in my gradeschool classes. ex: 7th grade text books. My 7th grade grammer book was Comptons College Grammer Book. My 7th grade Latin text book, Jenny Year 1, is far more advanced than any other language text book I've used. My 7th grade Math course covered precalc(same as my math core math 151). My 7th grade French text book, Bienvenue, well, at least they used an updated version when I took French 1 as a freshman here. Same text book, wow. So in this highly structured and academicly intense environment was a breeding ground for critical thinking and individual expression. I won't go into the social elements of the school, but if you're curious just ask me where some of my classmates ended up.
By 3rd grade I'd read everything on my parents book shelf except their copies of the bible. The bible appeared to me as obtuse, obscure, and obfuscated(note: latin prefix O or OB, from or away from). To me, the reading was as flat as the paper it was printed on. My parents were sending me to sunday school where I would ask the teacher impossible questions. "If god is all powerful, could god make a pizza so big that even god couldn't eat it? If god couldn't eat the pizza, then he couldn't be all powerful. If god couldn't make the pizza, then he couldn't be all powerful." Honestly, I was an ass about it. But at least I was smart. The woman teaching the class couldn't hold a normal conversation with me if I asked her about anything other than christianity. So instead of doing reading homework for sunday school, I would read novels off my parents book shelf(sometimes for the second or third time). My behavoir hasn't really changed. Even now, I'd rather read my own books than the books teachers tell me I need to read(although sometimes those ones end up being good too).
Now, during all of this, it's important to factor in my yearly trips back to Montana for the summers. I would play in my grandmothers garden, soak in my other grandmothers hot tub, and play with cousins. They would also take me to church. This is where I gloss over 10 years of aggrivation. Gradualy, they've accepted that I'm not going to be christian and no amount of mistreatment will inspire me to do so. I am not a perfect little catholic grandchild. But it's ok, I've been writen off because they have plenty of other catholic grandchildren(NOTE: this is only one of my sets of grandparents, the others are well meaning and I think only now have begun to come into their prime).
Eventualy, I would go spend my afternoons outdoors in a park instead of inside their church. I breathed the air. I felt the flowers. I tasted the sweet grass on the wind. I climbed trees. I rolled rocks. I watched birds. I raced against myself in every compatition. I was alive. I have never been alive inside of a church, paper airplanes or otherwise. They are a physical box around the imagination I am dying to express daily. The paint on their walls never changes. The ornamentation hanging from the walls and ceilings never changes. I had twice weekly classes in the cathedral which were always the same thing. "How many different devices for world domination can I assemble out of the items in my pocket?" It got to the point where I would save interesting things from throughout the day with strong amounts of anticipation for using them. Pen Cap = 7 minutes. Pocket Lint = 4 minutes. Large Eraser = 6 minutes. Paper Clip = 9 minutes. Combine these elements together and a form of imaginative fussion takes place. More time can be spent with them together in combination than their total time as individual elements. This was how my imagination expressed itself. I didn't have grass to run around in or trees to climb up. I had a chair to sit in.
My highly academic environment and highly surpressive of my imagination religious environment changed when I went to highschool. I went to one of the top public highschools in the nation and was tortured with their appathetic attempt at learning. Academics had surpased christianity as the main torment and hindrence of my education. I read books for English class which I had previously read in 5th grade. Math and Science were all areas I had covered previously. When we say highschool is hell, my experience of highschool time was that it was never ending. Those were the longest 50 minute classes of my life. My academic inspiration has suffered ever since. While the academics sucked, I was at least free of the bonds of christianity.
By now, a very clear distinction has been formed between christianity and other religions. While I was still in NYC, every year my family went to sader with our good friends. Judaism, as a religion, is less about "we believe" and more about "we remember". This is strikingly different from christianity. The inside of the mosque on 96th street and 1st avenue is the largest physical piece of art ever to touch my mind and heart. I understand about "the power of Islam". One of my good friends from gradeschool, her father died of cancer the other year. It is one of the most wrong things I've ever seen. The best way to learn about suffering, in it's entirety and how to circumvent it, is with the teachings of Buddah. The way christianity deals with life and death is simply not good enough for me. Christianity is the religion most lacking which I have come into contact with and, for the first time in this journal entry, has been capitolized only because it is at the beginning of a sentance.
Ishmael and Mila 18 deal with the ideas of agriculture and the nazi's as representative of an unstopable force which only ends by destroying itself. This unstopable force is in actuality an idea. The idea that we can control our lives and the lives of the others around us, that we can and should control what lives and what dies, is the single most frightening idea of mass distribution in the history of our species. More so than any other major religion, christianity appears to perpetuate this idea. Ethnocentrism, cultural domination, and human/animal exploitation exist because of this idea. Every form of poverty existing in the world today can give its thanks to this idea. The upwards trickle of dollars we see in every developed country, where money goes from the working to the rich while widening the gap between the two, exists because of this idea. Every political system on the planet is supported by this idea. Major religions work as an impotent stopgap for surpressing the awful results of this idea. It is intended to provide a controlled system for the management of this idea and with its reliance on humans it is subject to the failings of humans. The most terrifying thing about religions is that they support this idea and, because their support and justification are printed onto paper, we lend them an unreasonable amount of faith.
We are faced with an impossible situation. Our world, it's countries, it's politics, it's people, it's major religions all run parallel with this line of reasoning, that humans are the pinnicle of achievement and, as such, are beyond the existing laws for everything else. We are so peak, we can superimpose our own laws over the naturaly existing ones. And we are so ignorant we expect this to work. This cycle cannot perpetuate itself indefinatly with success. This is the impossible situation we face. Somehow, we must step outside of that cycle. We will not create an impossible solution through the use of dogma or ignorance. Only by exercising our imaginations, by making them fly, can we develope paterns which will survive and thrive under the tyrany of the mass belief of "right". We need environments and institutions which support criticle thinking and imagination, not environments and institutions supporting mass excremental thought.
At the beginning of this lengthy post, I said "most christians". I've met some who, through an extrodonairy act of humility and submission, do not see themselves as gods gift to the Earth. They are simply here, for the time being. They have no fetish for controling every single life system on Earth and no enforced apathy or ignorance about perpetuating these ideas. They've been grounded in their belief system and are unquestioning. I'm not sure if it was their individual nature, that they were more compassionate, patient and sincere than others, or if they were simply ideal models of christians, the type of person churches try to create. I lean towards individual nature. I've met plenty of people who tell me I'm going to their hell because I don't believe in their god. Oddly, when I ask them "oh, which religion are you?" I never hear "Judaism" or "Islam" or "Buddhist" or "Hindi" etc... I don't think anyone else has seen the irony that I already AM living in their hell. This world is falling appart at the seems from the thoughts and attitudes that people like that hold dear and close. I wake up, go about my day, and go to sleep and this idea is always there. That time sense of hell, the unending, my experience in highschool, its like that every day. And it's all because of that little idea about controlling life.
I haven't edited anything above. I'll give myself a day or two and reread it. My guess is there are probably some pretty large gaps that need filling and questions that need answering. Feel free to inquire further into my ramblings...
-Edit-
i changed my mind. i don't really want to add to what i've said. it captures more of my spirit and less of my thought. for that reason, i don't want to change it. not yet...
Fun Article
salon.com/books/review/2005/11/16/myths
which i have posted here to avoid their damn comercials.
Why Myths Still Matter
The religious rituals that surrounded them are gone, but we're still drawn to stories that transform the world -- and ourselves.
By Laura Miller
Nov. 16, 2005 | A friend of mine, a classicist, believes that the news stories that most captivate the public always tap into some venerable Western myth or folk tale. George W. Bush (or any recovered addict) is the prodigal son; Chandra Levy is a sacrificial maiden along the lines of Andromeda or Iphigenia; Scott Peterson is Bluebeard. Sometimes the people acting out these old stories know just what they're doing -- W. expects his evangelical base to respond instinctively to his remake of the New Testament parable. Others, like Peterson, find themselves cast in their roles against their will. And chances are that the bottom-feeding tabloids that capitalized on Levy's death have never even heard of Iphigenia.
But maybe my friend's idea is tautological -- perhaps the definition of a myth is simply this: a story we feel compelled to tell over and over again. That's the notion behind a new series of books, "The Myths," launched this fall. Canongate Books will publish novella-length retellings of ancient myths, written by such luminaries as Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Donna Tartt.
The first two books, Atwood's "The Penelopiad" and Winterson's "Weight," choose classical Greek myths, "The Odyssey" and the story of Atlas and Heracles, respectively. (Presumably, some contributors will follow the lead of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe and pick myths from other traditions.) Atwood and Winterson stick pretty close to the earliest versions of these stories, but their results are radically different without actually violating the premise. There could be no better illustration of the fact that after centuries of telling and talking about myths, we're still not sure what they are and why they move us.
By way of introduction, the series kicks off with a nonfiction volume, "A Short History of Myth" by Karen Armstrong. The choice of Armstrong makes sense: Her exploration, in "The Battle for God," of the differences between two modes of thought, "logos" and "mythos," is an eloquent argument for the value of certain impractical ideas. Logos, Armstrong explained, is "the rational, pragmatic and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world." It "must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective." Mythos, in contrast, is "not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning."
According to Armstrong, premodern people considered both modes "essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence." While logos can tell us how to grow crops, build cathedrals and split atoms, mythos, often in circuitous ways, speaks of why we do these things.
A Briton, a former nun and a self-described "freelance monotheist," Armstrong lives in a mostly secular society set in a larger world roiled by religious fundamentalism. The mythos/logos formulation serves her well in the task of criticizing both. As a liberal person of faith, she can argue that a logos-ruled culture like Britain's fails to speak to the persistent desire for meaning. And then she can point out that literal-minded fundamentalists -- who insist that biblical stories describe actual historical events and divine directives -- mistakenly treat the metaphorical mythos of the Bible as if it were the logos of, say, Newton's law of gravitation.
But, at heart, Armstrong writes about religion, not literature, and her "A Short History of Myth" isn't a very satisfying lead-in to a collection of fictional works. For Armstrong, the high point in the history of religion came with what the German philosopher Karl Jasper called "the Axial Age," when "new religious and philosophical systems emerged: Confucianism and Taoism in China; Buddhism and Hinduism in India; monotheism in the Middle East and Greek rationalism in Europe." These aren't, however, traditions known for their great myths (except for the legends in the Old Testament, which seem to be a holdover from earlier times anyway).
The Axial Age heralded a new kind of spirituality that even Armstrong acknowledges "was not so heavily dependent upon external rituals and practices," rituals that many scholars regard as indivisible from the myths themselves. This "new concern about the individual conscience and morality" introduced by the Axial faiths may be worth celebrating (provided the faithful manage to act accordingly), but by concentrating on the inner life of the individual it made the communal ceremonies of mythic pantheism less important.
And none of this explains why the myths -- particularly the Greek and Norse myths -- are still with us, why painters still paint them, audiences still turn out to see them performed and writers still plunder them for material. When Armstrong insists that a myth cannot be separated from the rituals that embodied it, she is voicing a common anthropological idea about how mythic religions work. But is it really true, as Armstrong asserts, that "reading a myth without the transforming ritual that goes with it is as incomplete an experience as simply reading the lyrics of an opera without the music"?
Demeter, the Greek harvest goddess, forsook the world when Hades, the god of the underworld, kidnapped her daughter, Persephone. To save the planet from ruin, the gods reunited the mother and daughter, but because Persephone had eaten a few pomegranate seeds while she was with Hades, she is forced to rejoin him for a few months of the year; hence, winter. No doubt this story had its maximum resonance in the secret seasonal rituals -- the Eleusian Mysteries -- performed by the people who believed it to be "true." But the story still retains great beauty for those of us who don't subscribe to that religion or observe those rituals. (We don't even know what those rituals were, as no record of them survives.) And in a way, millions of us relive Demeter's story every time we see a lurid movie in which a distraught parent searches for a daughter lost in an urban underworld of drugs or porn or prostitution.
Even stripped of their original religious significance, even when we don't know their source, myths still strike us as being filled with meaning. Why this should be so is one of the mysteries of human culture. In the Middle Ages, scholars believed that ancient myths that seemed to pre-figure Christianity were allegorical premonitions of the revealed truth of the New Testament -- sort of like echoes that worked backward in time. Mr. Casaubon, the desiccated scholar in George Eliot's "Middlemarch," labored on a Victorian version of the same idea, his famously pointless and unfinished "key to all mythologies."
In the 20th century, the psychiatrist Carl Jung formed his theory of archetypes, motifs recurring throughout most cultures. The archetypes, he believed, arise from the collective unconscious, an inherited body of symbols shared by all humanity. Jung's concepts have stuck with us, and were eventually popularized by Joseph Campbell, who described various heroic myths as metaphors for the journey of an individual psyche from childhood to maturity. The fact that George Lucas was able to fashion a blockbuster pop epic -- "Star Wars" -- using Campbell's work as a blueprint demonstrates just how much power those stories retain.
Winterson approaches the myth of Atlas in this way, as a vehicle for reflection on the self. Atlas was a giant, a Titan condemned to support the world on his shoulders as punishment for rebelling against the gods. (Winterson, a lesbian raised in an evangelical Christian home, identifies with that rebellion.) He gets a brief respite when Heracles offers to take over the task in exchange for the golden apples that grow on a tree in Atlas' garden. (Only Atlas can pick them, and obtaining the apples is one of 12 labors Heracles is compelled to perform as punishment for flying into a rage and killing his own family.) Once the giant returns with the apples, Heracles asks Atlas to spell him for a moment so he can pad his shoulders, then runs off with the apples.
For Winterson, this is a story of unnecessary burdens -- not just Atlas', but Heracles' labors as well. Her Heracles is a boorish brute, a man of pure action, made uneasy by the immobility imposed by Atlas' task. Compelled to stand still for once, "his only company was the hornet buzzing outside his head, the thought-wasp buzzing Why? Why? Why?" Atlas, on the other hand, holds up the world with "such grace and ease, with such gentleness, love almost." In the story's most charming development, Atlas winds up freeing and adopting Laika, a dog shot into space by the Soviets in 1957. Having learned to love Laika as much as he loves the world, he finally considers the possibility of laying his burden down. "I chose this story above all others," Winterson writes, "because it's a story I'm struggling to end."
For Jung, myths and other archetypes stood for internal psychological states; Campbell's theories, as presented in his televised interviews with PBS journalist Bill Moyers, had a more social aspect. The purpose of myths, Campbell claimed, was to instruct us on "how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances." Moyers' questions -- not surprisingly, given his political background -- prompted Campbell to expound on how myths show us how to have a better marriage, reject empty consumerism and respect the environment.
Structuralism, beginning with the great French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in the 1950s, often took a less sanguine view of what myths teach us. These stories, they argued, are founded in cultural concepts that shape the way the people in that culture understand their world. Our inclination to grasp our experience in terms of duality -- light/dark, male/female, good/evil or, for that matter, mythos/logos -- is one example of such an underlying concept. Myths, a structuralist might say, supply us with dramatic confirmation of our own way of interpreting things. The peculiar, heady response they elicit from us -- that feeling of recognition -- comes from the fact that, on a subterranean level, they tell us that the values of our culture, the values we already hold, are right and true.
Atwood's ironic "Penelopiad" would probably please the structuralists. She has Penelope tell the story of Odysseus' long absence, but complicates it with the choral commentary of the 12 maids her husband executed upon his return. Was Penelope, as she and the "official" version of the story insist, faithful to her husband for the 20 years he was away? Were the maids, hanged for consorting with the suitors, merely the unfortunate victims of bad luck? "The Penelopiad" exhibits some long-standing Atwoodian interests: the difficulty of discovering the truth about people's private lives and the casual brutality of class hierarchies. She takes the Greeks' notion of heroism and turns it inside out, like a shirt, so that we can see the seams.
Theories about what myths are meant to teach us vary, but the idea that their job is to teach is tenacious. It's tempting to raise the Armstrongian point that this is a utilitarian, logos-shaped view of the ultimate in mythos material. C.S. Lewis, in his capacity as a literary critic, once wrote that myth gives us the sensation that "something of great moment has been communicated to us," and that "the recurrent efforts of the mind to grasp -- we mean, chiefly, to conceptualize -- this something, are seen in the persistent tendency of humanity to provide myths with allegorical explanations. And after all allegories have been tried, the myth itself continues to feel more important than they."
Lewis wrote persuasively about myth because (despite his Christianity) he was at heart a platonist and perfectly comfortable with the notion that what makes myths powerful is the fact that we can never adequately explain how they work and what they do. He also believed that people have never stopped making myths, even if nowadays they don't usually consider themselves to be doing something religious. Lewis' own good friend J.R.R. Tolkien created an imaginative work in "The Lord of the Rings" that millions of readers respond to with an immediacy that has little to do with modern notions of a "great" novel. Lewis thought Kafka had a similar myth-making genius.
In contemplating the stylistic inadequacy of one of his favorite writers, George MacDonald, Lewis asked himself if myth weren't, after all, something "extra-literary." A myth, he concluded, was "a particular kind of story which has a value in itself -- a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work. The story of Orpheus strikes and strikes deep, of itself; the fact that Virgil and others have told it in good poetry is irrelevant." Language itself isn't even required. The story could be told in mime or silent film or in a wordless comic book and it would still be itself. Furthermore, it can be told in widely different ways -- set in the favelas of Brazil, for example, like Marcel Camus' 1959 film "Black Orpheus," or in a kind of modern, surrealist neverland like Cocteau's "Orpheus" -- and still be the same myth.
Today, our standards of literary excellence are intimately entwined with the idea of originality and individual expression. Myths, on the other hand, are communal. They are also stories first and foremost, and contemporary literary critics do not hold story in particularly high regard, when they regard it at all. Like depictions of sex, story is seen as appealing to people on the crudest level, to the lowest common denominator. A book that has nothing else to offer can still thrill hordes of unsophisticated readers with pure, page-turning plot.
The seminal modernist works that still define our idea of literary genius often referred to myth without actually partaking of it. Mythic fragments float through T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," but there are no stories in the poem. James Joyce's "Ulysses" is not the epic tale of a man's 10-year journey home from a foreign war; instead, the novel aims to elevate a day in the life of an ordinary fellow to the grandeur of a hero's adventures. When such works succeed, they succeed in a modern fashion, as unique, form-breaking innovations, but not as myth.
As exhilarating as the modernist experiment has been, it eventually collided with what appears to be a fact of human nature, the reality that our minds are built of stories. To stick with the metaphor above, a steady diet of books without stories turns out to be as appealing as a life without sex; some people take to it, but not many. At the same time, an explosion of media has immersed the average citizen in a cloud of competing voices, and those voices have learned that stories capture people's attention. In a culture where nearly everyone -- politicians, TV producers, journalists, advertisers -- talks obsessively about the power of stories, the very artists most associated with the telling of tales, novelists, seem the least comfortable doing it.
So the "Myths" series is very welcome. It reminds us that not every talented writer can or should aspire to the model of the novelist as iconoclastic Great Man. (It's no coincidence that some of highest-profile contributors to the series are women.) Both Atwood and Winterson weave less prestigious modes of storytelling -- gossip and memoir -- into their new versions of Greek myths. The best novels have always had at least a dash of both. And perhaps the best myths have, too. But underneath it all there is still the "something of great moment" that Lewis wrote about, a something that eludes definition. Perhaps Winterson puts it best when she writes, "These are the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true."
Monday, November 14, 2005
tid-bits
I attempted some form of an explanation for Emily's question here.
Family Proverb: "Don't get hurt. It hurts to get hurt."
Bad Days: Bad days can begin and end in any number of ways. They can start out with low test grades, end with vehicle accidents, and are usually filled with an assortment of accidents, mishaps, goofups, mistakes, victimizations, judgements, sacrifice and suffering. Their machinery is often greased with blood, your blood. And isn't that just so fun.
I think I might be having a bad day right now. I woke up and found I had 13 calls from my best friend. It looks like she won't be able to move here next sememster because of legal issues. And then when I had to walk to class from the parking lot, I realized I forgot to wear warm clothing and I was really really cold. And then when I tried to sign up for some of my classes, the computer wouldn't let me because someone stupid entered the times for the class wrong(no, it's not me) and so I have to go kavetch to the NAS department about some moron being a moron and oh oh oh! the frustrations!!!
