Closing Remarks

My first semester at MSU, people asked me constantly if I had ever taken a Dr. Sexson course; everyone was eager to admonish me when I replied that I hadn't. There was honestly not a single person who I spoke to that had anything other than good things to say about him. So, when I found out he was retiring, I knew I had to sign up for one of his last courses.

I had desperately wanted to take the Shakespeare course, but it was full by the time it was my turn to register, so I fell to Mythologies - the one class I had wanted but never had the chance to take in high school.

And, as always, the Fates had a reason for letting this happen.

This class has been beautiful. I mentioned during my last presentation my fear of presentations, and how I had no problem with them in this class at all; in fact, even though I cried, that presentation was the calmest, most collected and most organized that I have ever been for something like that. I don't know what to attribute it to - but the comfort that I feel in class is one that I have not felt elsewhere in a long time. Or as long as 21 years can be haha.

I am truly thankful for the opportunity I had in this class, to be able to hear and discuss all of the things that are close to my heart. We spoke of life, and of people; the simplest but most extraordinary things. I'm grateful for the chance we had to hear Frederick Turner speak at the poetry reading and in class the next day - but I am most grateful to have met and been a student of Michael Sexson.

♪ Tell me Phaedrus, what's good? Is it Idaho? ♫

The only regret I have is that this class is not continuing into next semester. Thank you all, so very much.

A Closing of Sorts (My Final Paper)

I want to begin this story with a movie that is close to my heart for many different reasons, but foremost, because it is about life in the most ordinary, extraordinary sense. One of my absolute favorite movies is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; it is one that has always left me in awe as the credits roll up.

            Button is the story of a man who is aging backwards – he is born old, as a baby, and grows into a young man as he gets older. The body is old, but the mind is young, and those two switch places as we follow him through his entire life. There is wisdom in the words of that film that will ring true in me until I die. “I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.” But I digress.

            For as long as I can remember, I’ve always believed in signs, which is why the Nabokov story has captivated me, and why I love the smallest words and phrases that I have scribbled in my “notes” from this class. I was that strange child who saw things…just a little bit differently than the other kids my age, was interested in something deeper, though I didn’t know what that was. I still don’t – I don’t know that I ever will.

            I have a very dear friend who is the same way. She’s currently living in Austria, but if there is one other person in my life who shares my belief in the little things, it’s her. We’ve been writing since we were little. If you’ve heard me speak in class about how I identify with trees, how some people say that I am a tree, it began with her. I’ve always loved them. To this day, I go back to the Aspen Grove along the Boulder River in the Absoarka’s where I’ve been camping with my family since I was little, and I still feel a peace sitting among them that I’ve felt nowhere else but in the arms of my soul.

            The connection I feel with trees is the same connection my friend feels with birds. I have always been the tree, and she has always been the bird. If anamnesis or reincarnation does indeed happen, then at some point we were these creatures.

            This is all leading somewhere, I promise you.

            I have one younger brother; his name is Josh. While I have a huge family with so many aunts, uncles, and cousins, he is my only sibling. We weren’t the typical siblings who fought constantly when they were younger or in middle school; we’ve always gotten along so well. This year is his freshman year at MSU – he’s following in our father’s footsteps and obtaining his Mechanical Engineering degree. I’ve spent my whole life protecting him, taking care of him as well as he’ll let me, so it was funny that I would be new at MSU the same year he would be. A chance to keep an eye on baby brother during his first “crazy” year of college? Check a happy yes.

            I never wanted to go to school at MSU; it was where all (ha – exaggeration is always amusing when you’re 21 looking back on 18) my fellow classmates went after they graduated. And yet, after two years out of state, and one of the most amazing trips in my life, deciding to transfer to Montana State University was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Life is a series of circumstances, changing perceptions, and love. All three led to where I am now, and to what happened last November.

            The weekend of November 3^rd, 2012, my boyfriend Cody and I went home because the wedding of two of his good friends from his ranching community was taking place. Josh, not having any obnoxious Calculus homework that weekend, decided to go along and see his friends he’d graduated with that still lived in Miles City.

            The Saturday evening of the wedding for us was late night in Austria, where my friend was watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with a group of people she was studying abroad with; we share a love of this movie. While Cody and I were dancing at the wedding, she was watching it. In the film, there is a character named Daisy who is a ballerina, and there is a beautifully tragic scene partway through where she is hit by a car. All of the circumstances leading up to that one event are shown first, and the scene ends with the quote, “But life being what it is - a series of intersecting lives and incidents, out of anyone's control - that taxi did not go by, and that driver was momentarily distracted, and that taxi hit Daisy, and her leg was crushed.”

            When the movie finished, my friend looked at one of her friends and said, “Something bad is going to happen, Gwen. I know it. Just like with Daisy. I can feel it.” She couldn’t shake the inkling – she went to bed.

            The wedding had ended; Cody had dropped me off at home and I’d said a goodnight to my parents, who were waiting for Josh to get home from hanging out with his friends. I fell asleep quickly, my feet aching from all of the dancing we’d done.

            Later that night – 2 am, as I would later realize – I was dreaming. I couldn’t tell you about what, but at the end, a horrific boom jolted me awake – one that I’d assumed had been in my dream. Minutes later, my mother was at the door: “Josh has been in an accident.”

            In the midst of this, I texted my friend in Europe, telling her that my brother was in an accident, and asking for her prayers for him.

            It was three blocks away from my house – the pickup had hit a tree. The scene of the accident was a nightmare that is a blur of images and flashing red lights for me; one that I try hard to not remember. I thought he was dead. I saw the pickup smashed against the tree, and thought for sure he was dead; seeing him in the ambulance alive, but in pain was as much of a relief as it was a horror. His femur had snapped clean in two, but that was all we knew. No one was telling us much else, but he would have to be airlifted to Billings. It was a long few hours in the hospital.

            At the same time all of this was happening, it was late morning in Austria. My friend was walking across campus, back to her building. She was about to walk by the computer lab, when a little bird landed by her feet, looked up, and whistled at her. Immediately, she went to the lab, checked her messages, found mine, and found her gut had been right.

            The tree and the bird.

            It was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through – brought on by one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. If one thing had been different – if I hadn’t transferred to Bozeman, if Jimmy and Lavonne hadn’t gotten married that weekend, if I’d invited Josh to come to the wedding with me, if I hadn’t invited him to come home with us this weekend, it would never have happened.

In some way, it was my fault. And, yet in some way, I saved him.

The pickup hit a tree that night – a small cottonwood that looked so thin to me I couldn’t believe it was still standing. But it had hit that tree, and if it hadn’t, it would have gone straight through the wall five feet behind it, and my little brother would have been killed.

Kelse said it with written words, the way that we speak best. “You. You are the tree. And the tree stopped him. You buffered him. Just like you always do. You had to buffer your brother from the worst of the world.”

All of this happened before Mythologies. But throughout this class, this one event is what I have been coming back to, what I’ve centered around, and that was never shown more clearly than in my displacement myth of the story of Phaethon. Phaethon dies – and writing that story, writing what didn’t happen in real life to me, to my brother, was one of the most healing things that I have ever experienced.

What this class has taught me, and what I think I’ve always known, is that I’ve always been a “mythic detective” of sorts. This class has been the glasses I needed to see clearly. I will forever carry them around in my pocket for those unexpected moments, huge or small, that present themselves every day in ways that are a thousand years old, and yet as new to me as the different light I open my eyes to every morning.

Copyright K. Weyebacher 2013 - "I found youuuuuuuu."

 

Tangled, Curly, Long, Short, Braided, Sraight, Oh My!

Janie Crawford has the hair that I have wanted since I was a little girl. I was captivated by it four years ago when I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God , and I'm incredibly jealous of it once again on reading it a second time. I'm not sure that there is a passage that describes it thoroughly in the book, but it's always looked thick curly, a long, long braid down her back. I've dreamed of having hair that long for years - I haven't gotten very far haha.

But it isn't just pretty - it isn't just a vain attribute of hers. It's almost a display of her power, of her freedom. And when Joe Starks makes her tie it up under a headscarf, it's criminal. And also conveniently symbolic of how he holds the "power" in her life for the next twenty years.

Halle Berry as Janie in the movie adaption of "Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hair is so HUGE in literature - folk tales, fairly tales, mythology. Samson who's strength was in his hair, Rapunzel and her long magical locks - it there a single Disney princess (other than Snow White, who I will note was also my least favorite when I was little on account of her short hair) who doesn't have long hair? Mulan doesn't count - hers was long at the beginning.
It's a beautiful, vain, mythic thing.

Griet, the protagonist in Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring chooses to hide her hair on her own underneath layers of scarves; it becomes this mysterious, almost sensuous object of curiosity to the men in her life, but it is her power, and no one elses.

Girls, you know we all thought this what we looked like with our hair blowing n the wind...

What is it about hair that has always and continues to captivate us? In my earlier fiction writing, I would devote a paragraph if not more to the description of my heroines hair - some of my favorite book passages do that as well. How beautifully interesting. 

Past and Present

"Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."

Every once in a while, there is a movie that leaves me still as the credits role, with this faint smile on my face. I can't move - I can only think about how absolutely powerful that movie was, sometimes in ways I don't even know yet myself.

I went home this weekend to spend some time with my family since I hadn't made it home for Easter. The Sunday before I left, I had intended to go see my boyfriend's family out at the ranch, but a freak mini blizzard prevented me from doing that, and led me to doing one of my favorite things: watching a movie with my father.

We have the same sense for watching movies - we discuss it as it plays through, feeling through it's twists and turns (we're those people you don't want to sit behind at a theater) and usually figuring out the ending. Thank the lord my boyfriend's the same way, or I'd never be able to watch a movie with him.

Anyway, the movie we'd picked for the afternoon was "Cloud Atlas" which came out last year I believe. It's one I've been wanting to see, despite all the bad rap it's gotten for being long and drawn out and complicated - which is my cup of tea.

And I loved it. So. Much. I can't explain the story line - or rather, lines - because there are six different time periods ranging all the way from the 1800's to 2144, to what they call "The Fall."

But it's about people, and their lives, their loves, and how each act that they perform resonates through history, into a future they don't even know exists yet. All of the actors play multiple characters in these time periods. I think it's magical to think about how our actions could affect someone in the future that we don't even know about yet. It's astonishing. I can't put it into words.

Cody walked in right as the credits rolled, and was sad to have missed it because he could tell by the look on my face that it had been something good. That's ok - I'd love an excuse to see it again. :)

The Gods Envy Us

"Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,  alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires." - Wallace Stevens

Dr. Sexson spoke this line earlier in the semester, but hearing it again today made me remember something.

A few years ago when I was still in high school, I had quite the obsession with the movie Troy. Not because of Brad Pitt as Achilles, or Eric Bana as Hector, but because of a love story with a line that I never forgot.

Wolfgang Petersen's own take on the Trojan War doesn't follow Homer's Illiad completely - rather, he tells the story with some changes and variations (our favorite thing in class). The change that I loved so much was the relationship between Achilles and Briseis, which is completely different than the actual story. I don't even think her name is Briseis, or that she meant anything at all, but I loved this version of the story; the strong warrior who finds peace and love through the strong-willed (I do love strong heroines!) priestess. Forget Paris and Helen.

The scene that struck me takes place after Achilles has "saved" her - again, struggling with the "I want to be a strong independent woman, but MAN I love chivalry" complex that I have - and takes her back to the tent and feeds her, gives her water to wash her wounds, etc. She's a priestess, and what follows is this conversation, which I love so much:

Achilles: You dedicated your life to the gods; Zeus god of thunder, Athena goddess of wisdom – you serve them?

Briseis: Yes of course.

Achilles: And Aries god of war, who blankets his bed with the skin of men he's killed?

Briseis: All the gods are to be feared and respected.

And then this line, which has stuck with me:

Achilles: I'll tell you a secret, something they don't teach you in your temple. The gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now, and we will never be here again.

Death as something beautiful, once we come to know it, once we see it that way. Tragically beautiful. If it wasn't, would so many of the greats written about it, and would we still be fascinated by it today?

I love quotes that stick with you for reasons you yourself sometimes can't explain.

Wings

Canova's "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss"

 A week or so ago after spending a whole afternoon/evening in the sun, I sunburned myself - which, despite the bad health issues attached to it and the redness, is one of my favorite feelings. A day after, I put on a tank top different from the one I'd worn that day and my boyfriend says, "Love, it looks like you have wings!" The tank top I'd been wearing during the sunburn-ing had a wavy strap down the middle of my back that had left that skin white compared to the now tan shoulders and arms; when I spread my arms out on either side ("gracefully" like the ballerina I've always wanted to be), it looked like I had wings to him.

Wings. A human fascination born of us lacking them, and watching all those that possess them soar. There's something ethereally beautiful about it. I want to talk about anamnesis, but I'm saving that for my paper. However, this above photo caught my eye in class.

Next to Bernini, Canova was one of my favorite sculptors that I encountered on my study abroad travels. I saw this statue in person at the Louvre - Pascaline, my Art History professor said that it had been the inspiration for the images of some of Walt Disney's princess characters. It's tender, and it's beautiful - being the romantic that I am, I fell in love with this image. So much love. And look at his wings!

"Cupid and Psyche Contemplating a Butterfly"

Next to that statue, is another one of his works - and this one touched me more than the first. It's called, "Cupid and Psyche Contemplating a Butterfly" but on seeing it, I remembered what Pascaline said earlier about the Greeks seeing the butterfly as a symbol of the soul - something we mentioned in class on Monday. And seeing that statue, watching Psyche gently place this little butterfly in Cupid's hand I thought, She loves him and knows him so well, she is trusting him with her soul. 

To me, without trust, there is no love. Among the Greek/Roman gods, there isn't much trust or fidelity (As we all know), but I was looking at that statue forgetting that, and imagining a different couple, a young couple. And that simple gesture, that little symbol, spoke mountains to me.

In most love stories, it's the heart that is given - so isn't it funny that we say "soul-mates" instead of "heart-mates"? And yet my two favorite book quotes say nothing of the heart, and everything of the soul. Wuthering Heights, "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" and Their Eyes Were Watching God, "Janie looked upon him with a self-crushing love. And so her soul crawled out from it's hiding place."

There are the matters of the heart, and then of the soul.

How incredibly beautiful is the idea of butterflies symbolizing something so deep and powerful, on such light and colorful wings. Us, and our winged souls.

Mr. Turner

Frederick Turner was absolutely amazing. The poetry reading was wonderful, and while I loved everything he read, my favorite was "The Lady's Impatience" - my boyfriend raised an eyebrow at me during that one. Turner is so incredibly humble for how talented he is - a trait that seems lost on a lot of younger, well-learned/known people today.

It was wonderful to have him in class on Friday - he's a wonderful speaker. I regret that I didn't get to ask my question of him before we ran out of time, but it may not have been the time or place for it, as it was of a less academic nature then some of the others that were raised.

My question was of his childhood; what an amazing thing to have been raised on three different continents! How we were raised, where we lived and the people and events we grew up around is so much a part of us, and as writers, it's an enormous amount of story for us to build the stories we write on. I'm very curious how his childhood influenced him as a writer, and what led him to his fascination with the Epic - he knows so much.

Also, I'd like to meet his wife - his poems about her make me smile. She sounds like a fun lady. :)

Happy Birthday Sibylla!

Today would have been the 366th birthday of Maria SIBYLLA Merian. I love that the day after we talk about the Sibyls in class, I open up my home browser (Google) and it tells me that today is the birthday of a woman with"sibyl" in her name!!

She was what Wikipedia calls, "A Swiss naturalist and scientific illustrator" in the late 1600's. Born in Frankfurt, she was influenced by her step-father to learn to draw and paint, and she was fascinated by bugs and insects, particularly the butterfly.  Too quote them directly, she is known for, "her careful observations and documentation of the metamorphosis of the butterfly."

Metamorphosis.

Also known as a botanical artist, Merian worked in Suriname traveling around the local colonies, documenting and painting the plant and animal life. When she returned home, she sold her specimens and she published a book called Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.

The fact that she studied insects at all is pretty amazing, because they were often referred to as "the Beasts of the Devil" (which may or may not be true - thanks for making us doubt you Wiki) in that time and because of this, not many people knew anything about the transformations many of them undergo.

What an awesome woman.

Ordinary Day

I set out last Saturday to have an "ordinary" day. Since I couldn't make it home for Easter, I was in Dillon, as is per usual every other weekend. I had the task of getting dinner ready for the Pre-Easter/Birthday dinner we were going to have that night. Everyone else was at work.

I'd had Mom email me some recipes earlier for different salads that I could make to go with the ham, ones that my family usually has a lot of during different holidays. And it was funny, to find myself elbow deep in pudding or cabbage or whatever else I was working with at the time, to realize that I acting like my mother - carrying on that tradition, through food. The myth for girls' that "we all turn into our mothers" peeks out every now and then for me and either scares me, or makes me smile.

Easter eggs were next - the dyeing, and then making deviled eggs out of them. Mythological qualities of Easter eggs? Mythological qualities of Easter itself? It was one thing after another. even ended up watching "First Knight" that evening - a version of the Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere folklore. Smolders, and Sean Connery.

It's pretty much impossible, at least for me, to go a day (I'm starting to realize) without something of that nature happening.

I've always believed in signs; how wonderful to be in class all about them.

Untitled (Displacement Myth)

The soil was rich, a dark, dark brown that reminded Rowan of coffee grounds.

She dug her hands into it, feeling the moist earth sift through her fingers and against her palms. The smell of coffee in her memory mingled with the earthy smell; she could see the cup of it in Noah's hand, and the blankets in the other, the streetlights casting stark pools of light in the parking lot. He had smelled of coffee, he always did. She had held onto to him tightly, inhaling his scent, desperately trying to cleanse herself of that sterile white smell that clung to her like a disease.

Her hands tightened around the earth and she drew back, touching the leaves of the small potted aspen next to her. To the left out of the corner of her eye, the large oak loomed. She tried not to look at it.

The park was abuzz that day; families flocked to the huge green of Tamarack with baby trees in their black plastic pots. Mothers held the hands of little toddlers who clutched green toy buckets and shovels, and fathers pushed back the brims of their baseball caps while they toted trees and tools, looking up at the sun as it climbed in the sky. The park's Arbor Day celebration every year was a huge event in Terry, and it teemed with trees of various ages planted every year at the end of April. To Rowan, it was as large of a forest as she could find in eastern Montana, and she knew the best oaks to sit in with a book. “Your own little urban forest,” her Dad always said, his eyes twinkling.

When was the last time they had done that?

Penny, who was six, was next to her, arms pushed into the ground all the way up to her elbows, watching her older sister. Her wide blue eyes blinked, red hair blowing around her face in the breeze. Her little willow sat beside Rowan's aspen – the tree their mother had selected for her. The one her mother had asked her to plant on her behalf was a small cottonwood – funny, Rowan thought wryly, that she'd picked a cottonwood, what with her allergies and all. She used to fill burlap sacks with all the cotton that piled up under the patio table and in the corners of the fence to make pillows for her stories until Momma had apologetically thrown them, sneezing as she did.

Momma hadn't come today, and neither had Dad, who had muttered he didn't want a tree and had gone into the garage. Penny and Rowan had left both of them near the driveway, where Shawn had always worked on his pickup.

Rowan swallowed hard and stood, reaching to the fold-up shovel she'd thrown in the pack. The sound of the shovel slicing through the earth was softened, as though the ground was hurrying to muffle it. The white noise of the people around them grated on her nerves. Couldn't they all hear it? That horrific boom that the trees had done nothing to muffle?

Sometimes she thought she could hear his neck snap, like a sharp clap of thunder during the lightning storms he loved. That wasn't possible.

 

Penny pulled both fists out of the dirt, itching at her cheek and leaving a smudge across the her face; warrior stripes on an angel. “Can we plant mine first? Please Rowan?”

She smiled a half smile and nodded, tucking loose strands of auburn hair behind her ears. “Yeah, love. We can do that.”

The rosebud of Penny's mouth saddened a little as she watched her big sister dig. She wished she'd hum again while she worked, singing under her breath the way she always used to when she'd load the dishwasher or pull weeds in the garden.

Rowan stuck the shovel in the ground and got down on her knees, taking the willow and gently pulling it from the plastic pot it rested in.

Shawn had teased her for how much she loved trees almost as much as she poked at him for obsessing with machinery. He had always been in the garage, tinkering with whatever broken pickup or car was parked in the left side of the garage that Dad had designated “the Shop.” Putting a lift on his pickup had been the latest thing, though they'd sold it to someone in Forsyth last month.

Rowan ran her hand over the thinness of it's branches and it's tiny trunk, looking at the white roots that ran through the small bit of attached soil. They looked like veins, pale and stark against the brown. She hurried to cover them, patting the soil in place quickly. The veins in his arms had been green and purple, vivid through his still, translucent skin.

Penny patted the soil, the dull thud of her little hands packing the tree in place. She smiled. “Next?”

The two sisters worked on their knees, until the three little ones stood newly grounded, cottonwood, aspen, and willow in a perfect line, facing the big oak.

They were so little, Rowan thought, and so young. Their branches were thin, their bark still supple, and they all reached for the sky in a child-like stretch that Rowan watched Penny do before running off to join the other younger kids spinning on the axis of the blue and white merry-go-round.

To this day, she didn't know where the scream had come from. She'd looked at the accident, the mangled front end of the gray dodge accordioned into itself, the bits of glass crunching under her feet and sparkling obscenely in the ambulance light. She'd seen the open door of the ambulance where she glimpsed the matted fluff of her brother's black hair and heard her father saying, “I'm the father it's ok” to the paramedic in the white latex gloves – she hated those powdered gloves so much – who was trying to stop him, and saw Penny's face pressed against the window of the car where she'd been told to stay, her face red in the neon lights that wouldn't stop flashing, casting the scene into a bloody pall.

None of it was real. None of it could be – this was a scene from the movies she'd watched, these were the bad things that happened to other people on the evening news at night, while she was tucked away under the pages of her current book and the songs on her tongue.

In the real world, Shawn would be sitting next to her on the grass right now, waiting for them to be done planting and for Penny to be done playing and for Momma to be done talking to all the people she knew from church and for Dad to finish reading his book in the shade.

They would be staring at the rough bark of Rowan's favorite oak's trunk, wrinkled like the corners of the eyes of a wise old lady. She would be teasing him, and he would laugh that funny laugh where his voice would disappear that she'd been hearing for the last twenty years of her life, and his eyes would crinkle until he would say, “Ohhh man that's funny.” Fun-nay – that's how he said it. But this wasn't a real world anymore, and it hadn't been for a year now.

Because Shawn had fallen asleep at 2:30 am on April tenth, at the wheel of Dad's Dodge.

He had driven off the road and slammed into that oak.

He had gone through the windshield and his neck had broken.

And he had never woken up in that white bed in the hospital where he'd been hooked up to all sorts of tubes and wires, his paper thin eyelids covering his big brown eyes that none of them would ever see again.

All this left her staring at the trunk of the oak, the huge spot where the pickup had torn it's bark away and slashed deep scars into it's wood. It'd been a year, so the color of the exposed part had darkened and deepened as though it was trying to camouflage the damage, but the scars were still as sharply horrific as Rowan remembered seeing that night.

She closed her eyes against the sirens and the flashing lights and the colors.

“Rowan?”

She felt the touch of Penny's hand on her shoulder. Turning her head, Rowan saw her baby sister run her fingers through the little round leaves of the aspen, so green. “Hmmm?”

“I don't feel much like playing anymore.”

Rowan knew that face. She knew that blank stare, the one that was warding off whatever was surfacing in her memory. Her little sister's chin wobbled. “R-r-rowan...”

“Come here baby girl,” Rowan whispered, and Penny curled up on her lap, tucking her face in the crook of her neck. Rowan held her tight.

They sat there, the two girls and the young trees and the old trees.

They stayed until the roots of their legs let go, and they left the park, carrying the past in their pockets and under their nails.

This weekend, I had the misfortune of spending my money on the new movie "Olympus Has Fallen" which is yet another story about a foreign country (and following the same streak most of these other movies are following, that country is again North Korea) taking control of our government, before being defeated by the courageous hero played by King Leonidus himself: Gerard Butler.

I thought the script was awful, and the one redeeming thing I found about it was, as usual, Mr. Morgan Freeman. My boyfriend and I went in with high hopes...and had to squelch our laughs while they dragged a defiant Secretary of State down a hallway as she started shouting the Pledge of Allegiance at the top of her lungs. It was pretty awkward.

But, because of it's mythological content (seen most obviously in the name) I decided to post about it. In the movie, there is a program that controls our nuclear weapons "launch codes" or something to that effect, and they call it Cerberus, after the three-headed hound guarding the gates of the underworld. Accordingly, this program has three pass codes needed to gain access which would metaphorically allow "the gates of Hell" to be opened - as Mr. Freeman states in one of his lines. I'm curious - why does the government's (at least, the movie world's version of government) always use mythological names for classified things?

So disappointed. But the trailer for the baseball movie about Jackie Robinson looked good.

"In Thrace the natives show their visitors
Two trees so close together that their branches
Seem to grow upward from a single trunk."

- Ovid's Metamorphoses

Happy World Poetry Day.

I wrote what is below before I read the story, but the story of Baucis and Philemon is one of my favorites from Ovid, and I didn't realize until today how well these fit together (at least in my mind).

How far down does your love go
earthed in the
rich soil of your soul that turns
and breathes
takes root even in the tips
of your fingers
Grounding you in a place
there is no ground
but skin
under gentle palms
His rough cheek against the flower of yours
The leaves that brush against
both lips
and arms that wind as branches do
in the most ancient
of embraces.
This –
is this what it is
to touch another's soul and find
it is your own?

by Autumn Toennis - Jan 2013


Trees. Always trees, and the timeless love they symbolize for me.

"The world I see and the words I have do not match."
- Helen in Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale

 One of my favorite quotes, and to come from such a terribly sad story. I happened upon Tereus, Procne, and Philomela (or Philomele) last semester in my Revenge/Tragedy class when we read the above play - a feminist take on the Ovid myth, written in the late 80's. It has a much more modern feel to it than the original story, but some of the language within still struck me the way specific phrases in Ovid do - like the phrase above.

There are moments in stories where certain lines jump out at me and put into words all of the scrambled swirling thoughts in my head that I can't keep straight - or say something much more eloquently than I could ever hope to. This above line did that for me; my words not matching the world is something that I feel everyday. They are inadequate for the beauty and the pain that I see and I read and learn, but...nothing I write or say can satisfy what I feel and want to convey. And sometimes it's the smallest things, like those twelve words, that let me breathe momentarily with the realization that someone, even if I don't know them and never will, understands, and wrote the words I felt.

It's my own sort of "pain" I suppose - nothing like what Philomele and Procne, and even Tereus, suffered, but a frustration that hounds most people my age and probably well beyond. A search for understanding that's never content. And...pain is beautiful in it's own way. We write tragedies, we read sad stories, we cry when we hear songs that make us weep - but they're all beautiful, in their own way.

Maybe it's because we know that pain is something that will never disappear, that it's something that will always be with us. And because of that, we must find the soft things about it, the delicate parts that we hear in written in notes of songs and the eyes of all the people around us who have, in their own ways, experienced their own pain.

Or maybe it's just me. When I was younger, I took piano lessons from third grade all the way to my senior year in high school. In the evenings, while my mother would do dishes, I would practice piano because I knew she loved to sit and listen to me play. The only problem was that even from a young age, I loved the songs with that left that melancholy taste in your mouth that you couldn't quite explain, the ones that were sadly sweet, or bounded in huge angry chords. Momma would always say something akin to, "Why can't you play something happy, Autumn Marie? Why can't you play something happy for me?" She loved jazzier tunes, or happy ballads, things that I couldn't bring myself to play. I had a wonderful childhood - there was nothing terrible about it to induce this, but I played my sad songs - and I still do today.

I don't know why.

I think humanity is in some ways obsessed with pain, is fascinated by morbidity. We see it in the news, read it in articles, watch it on television, and read it in stories as old as that of Procne and Philomela and Tereus.

We haven't changed at all. And we're still asking the age old question: why?

A grave in Rome, Italy, Campo Verano

On that happy note, most recent song favorite - it's a cover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856dtR4mms

It fits this picture perfectly in a lot of ways.

Mr. Nabokov

"While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and reëxamined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels—apricot, grape, beach plum, quince. He had got to crab apple when the telephone rang again."

Beautiful. Sad. But so beautiful. It's after reading small things like these that I wonder how I can even acknowledge myself as a writer - that feeling of "how can I ever write something worthwhile?" etc. But at the same time, it's one of those that made me want to go out and write something so short and powerful. I loved it. To be cliche, there were so many "signs and symbols" within the story that I know have to mean something...but I'm not sure what. I think that's ok for now. We always discover new things every time we read a text again.

The myth that I felt a connection to through the story was of Icarus and Daedalus - the son who tried to fly, and the father who wanted to free him. That imagery itself is beautiful, but it's the ten little jars of jam that I can't figure out.

Time to read it again.

The Spinners

I do believe that some artists place things in paintings for particular reasons - the ladder is fading into the darkness for a reason, the cat at the women's feet has great significance, etc. But sometimes I wonder if when they paint, some artists say, "I will place this object here just to mess with my viewers because it doesn't actually mean anything!"

I do hope Mr. Velasquez is not one of those artists.

Because of the light in the back, my gaze is immediately drawn to the well-dressed women admiring the tapestries at the back - which I would presume is the one Athena wove, since the spinenrs at the front of the painting wouldn't have wanted to incur the wrath of the goddess by hanging Arachne's as well. And because of the era of the painting, and the dress, I would say they wouldn't want to hang Arachne's tapestry out of superstition, because of the story passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter over and over again as the years passed. They sit spinning, gossiping in whispers about secrets the fancy ladies in the back know nothing of.

But when I look at the tapestry itself, I see a different story. I rather think that the image woven is of Athena cursing Arachne. The figure on the left appears to be wearing a helmet, something that the goddess is commonly depicted wearing. And if that be the case, I would say that the spinners deliberately spun that tapestry themselves and hung it for all to see as a warning against pride. Maybe the pride of the rich who come to view the commoner's beautiful work?

Maybe the cat playing with the ball of string indicates that we were all being toyed with by a higher power. Maybe the ladder going into the darkness symbolizes that we should only reach so high.

I love paintings. There's so many layered meanings in them. Thank you, Pascaline de Mesmay, for showing me that.

Ticuna Initiation Ceremony

In the Ticuna Indian tribe, when a girl first begins to menstruate, she it separated from the rest of the tribe, and sequestered in a small room where only the elder women of the tribe are allowed to see her. They spend the time there educating her about the myths, history and stories of the tribe - a process that can take up to six months.

After that is finished, she is painted entirely black, and the symbol of her clan is painted on her chest. Then, all of her hair is pulled out by hand (though, in more recent years, the girls have the option of simply having their hair shorn). She emerges from the room, and it dressed in traditional garments; her eyes are covered, and then begins the four day period in which she is not allowed to sleep at all. During the day, as the tribe sings and chants and plays all sorts of instruments as she (assisted by a man on either side of her) continuously jumps back and forth over a campfire.

At the end of the four days, she and an infant from the tribe are carried to the river and placed in it, to represent the symbolic cleanse of her childhood. After this, she is officially considered an adult.

Phaedrus

" I don't know why I'm so gripped to go there
A universe riddle that only I know?
Mr. Robert he says, "It's all in the head!"
Tell me, Phaedrus, what's good, is it Idaho? "

I was driving home last night from acapella practice, with my iPod on shuffle and "Idaho" by Nerina Pallot surfaced. It's one of my favorite songs, and the timing was ironic because it's a song I associate with traveling - which I will be doing today right after this class actually. But the above lyric, the one right at the end, caught my attention.


Phaedrus.


It sounded mythological, but it wasn't one that I recognized from the Ovid book. Why would she put his name in the song? Why does he know what's good?


There were several men who came up with that name during my search, specifically Phaedrus, a book written by Plato, but the one who seemed to make the most sense was the Greek Phaedrus, who was the head of an Epicurean school of thought. Because Epicureanism revolves around the ideology that "pleasure" is the greatest good, it would make sense for Miss Pallot to add his name into her song, asking him, "What's good?"


Not as interesting as I was hoping for, but still neat to know the reason behind that line. There's always meaning in lyrics.

Here's the song - it's beautiful. 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RlcDuRQSas

We have a pretty easy time of with puberty compared to many of the puberty rites that go along some of the initiations I've been reading about. I don't think many of us have had to go through traumatic circumcisions, or be dropped out in the middle of the ocean to swim to shore at the first sign of menstrual cycles, or had our breasts ironed, or gauged our lips for beauty (ouch), or forced to burn our hands by handling a burning ball of cotton and then wear a mat covered with biting and stinging ants.

I don't think Western girls can say that learning to use an eyelash curler for the first time is anywhere near that painful. Sure, junior high is not usually full of fond memories, and some things can be emotionally distressing, but is any of that nearly as bad as all of the above?

I think this initiation assignment is wonderful in two ways - it gives us the opportunity to learn about different cultures from all the corners of the world, and it (at least, it does for me) gives pause for us to realize how fortunate we are that only dealt with acne and braces, and not scarification and poison. We are incredibly lucky.