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. :)