Final Project

Tracing Poetry

            Often times, we forget the limitations of text—not of a text so much as text itself especially when it comes to poetry.  Writing is, on the very face of it, something which attempts to contain and portray language which, itself, is attempting to contain and represent thought.  Poetry, in a sense, is trying to cut out the middleman by blurring the line between text and language in an attempt to bring the reader closer to the world of thought.  The two poems that we have looked at most in depth this semester are T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”  While both of these poems deserve consideration, I will spend this time focusing on “Kubla Khan.”  Coleridge takes us a step closer to the world of thought when, in “Kubla Khan,” he attempts to draw us into his dream.  This is a text which, since it was assigned to be memorized, we have all seen (and hopefully read) more times than we have heard it performed. However, we must move beyond the text itself.  We must present the text in such a way as to display the language that has been reduced to text and we must enact the dream that has been reduced to language.  This is something that is lost when poetry is read only as text.  Therefore, I have, after countless repetitions, devised my own version of “Kubla Khan” which I hope moves beyond the realm of text into the realm of dreams and thought.

            This idea is something that came to me last spring during a poetry reading by Frederick Turner, who I have already been mentioned this semester.  I do not remember the poem that he read where it clicked and, come to think of it, I still have not seen any of these poems in text form from his collection The Undiscovered Country, but there was something about the way he read them: the timing, the verve, the highs and the lows.  At this moment, I realized that anyone who does not hear this poem read, or performed, rather, by its author, will never understand what I am seeing.  The poem was well written; but admittedly, were I to stumble across the text version somewhere on the internet, I likely would not have looked twice, but in this auditorium, I was stopped in my tracks by the performance in front of me.  I pushed the thought to the back of my mind for some time but, slowly, it began to creep up on me and I began to realize that every poem I have ever read has only been some ghost of the original.    Emotion cannot be placed upon the page in the way that the author of poetry needs it to be; there is no punctuation that tells the reader to slow down and enunciate every syllable; there are no stage directions; there is no symbol to tell the speaker to lower his voice to a barely audible piano or to rattle the window-panes with a booming fortissimo.  The poet is like a craftsman working with tools that just do not fit into his hands: he does his best, but in the end, there is not a language for the thoughts of a poet.  In “Kubla Khan,” we see Coleridge struggle with these same problems.  That is why, whenever Dr. Sexson recites any portion of the poem, we are all left thinking, “what the fuck?”  Some thoughts lie to deep, are too thought-like to find a place in our system of language.  Keeping these insufficiencies in mind, I have taken “Kubla Khan” and attempted to move beyond the text and to do some things to the words on the page that cannot be written.

 

            In my reading of “Kubla Khan,” there are several of things that I employ that are not written on the page.  The first of these is the speed with which the first stanza is read.  I think the first stanza should be read slowly: the speaker (presumably Coleridge, since the historical context for this poem is so rich) is still trying to comprehend the dream that he has just had.  The words, “Xanado,” “Kubla Khan,” and “Alph,” are finding their way into language for the first time.  The strangeness of this must be just as striking to the poet as to the readers.  Along these same lines, there also needs to be some subtle question marks written in as Coleridge finds the correct word to fit what he is trying to describe.  This could hint at the fact that perhaps these words do not describe what he saw at all, but are as close as he can get using the English language.  The line break is the deep breath before the plunge: a ‘Eureka’ moment for the poet that demonstrates that he has realized, perhaps in that instant, where is going, and now he is going be drag the reader along.

            In the second stanza, Coleridge really picks up the pace.  We start to see exclamation points—four in the first five lines—as he becomes excited and really starts to let the description go.  The speed and volume of this stanza increase, perhaps so much so that the listeners are left a little bit behind because he knows that if he does not get this description out now, he never will.  And as the river falls for the second time, we slow down again.  The speaker, like the listeners is listening, listening for the “Ancestral voices” that “Kubla heard from far.”  We continue the slow speed throughout the end of the stanza.  Are these the words of the ancestors?  Probably not.  There are not words for their language, so we continue with our description, slowly now, since we are nearing the end and we read the final exclamation point of the stanza not so much as one of the excitement that carried us through the bulk of the stanza, but a note of triumphant resolution that we have made it thus far and are ready for the next step.

            The line-break between the ultimate and penultimate stanzas give, both the reader and the listeners a chance to catch up and be sure that they are on the same page.  The first five lines of this final stanza start slow and matter-of-factly, much as we ended the preceding stanza.  By now, the listener begins to think that the speaker has calmed down from the frenzy of the second stanza.  But, as the speaker paints the picture of the maid and her song, and begins to think about recreating them so that others could hear her “symphony,” we begin to increase the volume, and the tone is almost one of anger and frustration.  The speaker knows that he could never accurately recreate his vision and the maid’s song (which are one in the same), and he hates it.  What’s more, even if he could recreate it those who heard him and heard her song and saw the “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” would think him a madman.  This frustration is what leads us back into the exclamation marks and a second frenzy which brings us near the end.  As the fury breaks over the speaker and he realizes that everyone would think him mad, he realizes that it is he who has “drunk the milk of paradise.”  This creates the fall that seems to end the poem on a sad note, but there is something joyous in the broken voice, but it is an inner joy, a self satisfaction that, with these divine visions, he knows no one will understand, but that does not make them any less real.

 

            Keeping some of these things in mind, I would like to take some time to talk about how this poem relates to some of the other works we have looked at this semester.   Since I would like to allow for some time for discussion about any of these ideas, I am going to keep this discussion relatively short and focus on discussion points more than on a discussion itself.

            For Annie Dillard’s book, For the Time Being, we get the feeling that the “forests ancient as the hills enfolding sunny spots of greenery” are some of the places that she brings her reader.  From China to a hospital’s delivery room, Dillard helps how similar some of the most seemingly different situations, places, and people really are.  Is “Xanado” really any different from the archeological sights or the hospital or Israel or Rome?

            In The Secular Scriptures, Northrop Frye says,

On the lower reaches of descent we find the night world, often a dark and labyrinthine world of caves and shadows where the forest has turned subterranean, and where we are surrounded by the shapes of animals.  If the meander-and-descent patterns of Paleolithic caves, along with the paintings on their walls, have anything like the same kind of significance, we are here retracing what are, so far as we know, the oldest imaginative steps of humanity. (111-2)

Does the river in the poem do anything besides meander and descend?  In fact, Frye’s whole chapter titled “Themes of Descent” feels as if he could have been writing about “Kubla Khan” the entire time.  From the strange nature of the landscape, to the seemingly unintelligible language, to the fact that Coleridge experienced this all in a dream only helps to make this fact more apparent.  Is this the creative process? a series of rabbit-holes we all must fall down? And is it possible to descend too far?  Is this what Coleridge did?

            And finally, is Mircea Eliade’s Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries doing anything more than telling us to embrace those “Ancestral voices” that Kubla hears and we all listen for?  If Coleridge has descended into an unknown land, perhaps his drug induced stupor has made him privy to something we can only guess at: something primal and grotesque.  These are our primitive desires, thoughts, and creations, and we should surrender ourselves to them in order to get back in illo tempore.  Then, that before-time place, in the world of the descent, did Coleridge, somehow, tap into the collective imagination?

            How do all of these points relate to the other works of fiction that we have read and discussed?  To the poetry of “The Four Quartets” and the prose of The Magus?  Can Nicholas Urfe relate to the speaker’s frustration at the end of “Kubla Khan?”  What do we learn about time and descent when we pair “The Four Quartets,” Frye, and “Kubla Khan?”  Is Alison the demon lover? Or is Nick? Perhaps both?

 

            While many of these questions may not have definite answers, I am interested in knowing your thoughts when viewing these works from a ‘Kubla-centeric’ perspective instead of using The Magus as our starting point as we have done for the second half of this semester.

Time Past and Time Present

Since I have not done this yet, and it is long overdue, I figured I would give my two-cents on Arcadia since I have not yet said anything about it:

My comment has something to do with time.  We have already talked about the strangeness of the fact that past and 'present' are overlaid in the play, I wanted to talk a little more about the effects of that.  In a 'normal' story with a linear timeline, we watch events transpire in order and, in that case, we are able to hope for the characters.  We can see the bad coming and hope that something will change and that they will be alright in the end, but in this case, the characters in the past, namely Thomasina, are doomed, not by their time, but by the future.  In the case of Thomsina, we cannot hope for a reprieve from fate because, instead of being told of her fate in the present and, like Oedipus, suffering in real-time, the fate is given from the future.  In a literary sense, Thomasina is not doomed by her circumstances, or by the present, but is, instead, doomed by her future.  As soon as the people in the 1990s say that she dies that night, it is unavoidable.

This might seem like something insignificant, but in terms of literary devices, (in my knowledge) it is very rare.  It is not something that happens often, and the way that the story plays out both in its textual space and phenomenologically, unite to create an a-typical version of fate in literature.

For Lunatics and Poets

 

 

            Having finally finished The Secular Scripture, I thought now would be an excellent time to reflect on the book as whole.  I must start by admitting that if I have ever encountered “referential mania” in the real world, it has been in the works of Frye.  His ability to fly through works and draw obscure connections without making those connections explicit is something that will be lost on most readers as I expect will have happened on a lot of this class.  Frye expects his readership, or perhaps does not expect them, to recognize the works of the Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, know the relationship and—for lack of a better word—competition between them, all without naming the two of them specifically:  Tom Jones and Pamela are all the clues Frye gives to the relation.  Perhaps this type of mystery is what I find most pleasing in Frye’s work.  This demanded placed upon the reader to be well-read and be able to move from the smallest references to the larger works is what will make these works nearly impenetrable to someone who is not a fifth as well-read as Frye himself.

            Since we have talked about nearly all the chapters of the book in class, I want to point out one of my favorite sections from the final.  Near the end of the chapter, Frye, quoting Sartre, says “hell is other people.  The creative act is an individualizing act, hence, for all the sense of participation, we are also returning to a second kind of isolation” (184).  This reminded me of another quote that I once encountered, though I am not certain where, that said, “I am a writer because I want to tell stories, but I do not want to have to look people in the eyes.”  Later, Frye notes, “In human life creation and contemplation need two people, a poet and a reader, a creative action that produces and a creative response that possesses” (185).   There is, indeed, a unique relationship between the writer and reader.  There are no relationships that are the same.  Every reader, has an unique relationship with any writer.  No two are the same.  This creates a sense of isolation for the writer.  Each reader composes his or her own image of the writer and none of these creations, may be the correct one.  In this sense, the writer is surrounded by people who may think they understand him, and, perhaps, that is the greatest of isolations.  

If it doesn't change your life, you're not doing it right.

My collection of passages from The Magus.  I'm not going into this with a particular end in mind, so let's see what we come up with.


"Once more I was a man in a myth, incapable of understanding it, but somehow aware that understanding it meant it must continue, however sinister its peripateia" (Chapter 49)
 --[Note: Peripeteia (because the word 'peripateia' doesn't appear to exist) -  In classical tragedy (and hence in other forms of drama, fiction, etc.): a point in the plot at which a sudden reversal occurs. In extended use: a sudden or dramatic change; a crisis.(OED)]

"We are all actors here, my friend.  None of us is what we really are.  We all lie some of the time, and some of all the time" (Chapter 52)
--A little commentary on, not only the novel, but life itself.


Since we discussed the value (or absence of value, in the wrong hands) of writing in a book, here is the only thing that was written in my book.  Of all the 656 pages of my copy of the book, the only mark in my book that was not made by me is a bracket on pg 409 and demonstrates that someone thought this portion of the novel was the only part that merited any attention.

---------
     'I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.'
     'Then your ... meta-theatre is really a medical one?'
     Maria's shadow appeared behind him as she brought a soup-tureen to the white-and-silver table in its pool of lamplight.
     'You may see it so.  I prefer to think of it as a metaphysical one.'  Maria announced that we could take our seats.  He acknowledged her words with a little boy, but did not move.  'It is all an attempt to escape from such categories.'
     'More an art than a science?'
     'All good science is art.  And all good art is science.'
     With this fine-sounding but hollow apophthegm he put down his glass and moved towards the table.
---------   (Chapter 52)

--It starts mid conversation, and ends mid paragraph.  I can't tell whether her or she thought this was the only important part, or the only unimportant part.


"I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extraverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her" (Chapter 54)
--If this is not Fowles as his most eloquent, he was never eloquent.

Maniacal in the Best Way

I wanted to talk about coincidence.  Since it feels like nearly everyone else has shared some of their coincidences with the class, I figure that now is as good a time as ever to stop pretending that I am not experiencing the same thing.  We have already discussed the coincidence of me running into my grandmother after my ‘big dream,’ so I’m going to skip over that one but here are some of the other others, and most of them have to do with my own writing.  Let’s just look at some of the bigger points from the last week:

 1)       The other day, Dr. Sexson said, “One never returns, one only recreates.”  This rang a bell in my mind because for the past year—or there about—I have been working on a long story called, “No Traveler Returns” the title of which is, of course, inspired by Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy wherein Hamlet describes death as “The undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”  Sometimes it is good to hear one’s own thoughts sound from somewhere else.

2)      This is one that has been on mind for about half of the time we have been in class.  It started when Valerie posted a blog about our position as humans amongst the cosmos.  This is something that we have returned to several times throughout the semester, and each time, I have refrained from posting a short poem that I wrote a while ago that touches on the same topic.  This isn’t a forum for grandstanding, after all.  But in the Denk piece about the Goldberg variations that we read on Thursday, we came across the line, “infinite possibility from a single piece of code.” The words “infinite possibility” struck me like the one above.  Because, again, it was very similar to something that I had once written, except I called it 'infinite improbability.'
            The Stuff of Stars
We are each billions of years old,
Flying through the cosmos,
Across distances unimaginable;
We hold the fire.
 
From piece to piece
We gain existence.
Infinite improbabilities leading
To our human collective.

We’ve been waiting,
Since the beginning of time,
To be jointed, one particle
At a time.

A smile; a heartbeat;
A warmth; a tender kiss.
Assembled by gravity,
We are the stuff of stars.

A Big Dream

 

 

For the past couple years, I have always had, at quasi-regular intervals, dreams, which, if they are not ‘big dreams,’ are something of more complicated a nature.  For these dreams are so real and affect me so foundationally that when I wake up, I am still somehow tied to the dream an can’t help but to feel that my entire outlook on life has been changed.  And, when I say my outlook on life has changed, it isn’t really as positive as it might sound.  Instead, it is almost always something negative and makes me question exactly how influential our dreams are on shaping our perspective of the world around us.  In my attempt to explain this, I feel like I am doing nothing more than floundering, so I will share with you the last ‘big dream’ I experienced and the aftermath and hope that that will help with the explanation— 

It was one of those dreams where you think you know where you are, but, when you look back, you realize that things were not at all how they had ever been and that should have been your first clue to wake the hell up.  Alas, dreams and reason have never walked hand in hand.  It started with my going to my parents’ house—but it wasn’t my parents’ house, it was my grandparents’ (something I didn’t realize until I woke up).  This entire semester, my mother has been nagging me that she never hears from me and that she never gets to see me anymore.  Since they live just down the road in Three Forks, they expect that I would make that trip more often than I do.  Anyways, this day was one of those days where I was going to visit them, so I arrive at the house.  I remember thinking that things seem kind of strange but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  I went to the door and walked inside.  Things there also seemed strange but, again, I continued on.  After talking to the family for a little while, my mother finally, by her estimation, had found the perfect time to tell me that I was being kicked out of the house.  At first, I was taken aback by the mere fact that I had been out of the house and living on my own for years.  I tried to understand more specifically what was happening, but all that they would give me was that I was being kicked out and they had made up their minds about it.  After demanding a further explanation, I began to realize that I wasn’t only being kicked out of the house but I was, in fact, being banished from the family.  Again, I attempted to understand what was really happening and why my family, who have always been relatively close, was deciding to ‘kick me to the curb.’  Eventually, they became annoyed with all my questions and decided to leave and told me that if I was not gone by the time they got back, the cops would be called and I would be removed by force.

After they left, I went over to my grandparents’ who, for the some reason, had been moved next door and hoped that they could shed some light on what was going on.  Unfortunately, they had no answers and told me that is was best to “just do what your mom says.”  Realizing that I wasn’t going to get any explanations from anyone, I decided that since I already lived on my own, this wouldn’t been that much of a change and that I would just grab the few things that I had left there and be on my way.

Next thing I know, I had gathered my belonging (more things than I am positive are still in my parents’ house today) and had them all out on the front porch and was about to move them to my car when another complication ensued.  My parents, believing that I would either, not be able to move my stuff, or simply choosing to ignore them, would not leave their house and so, they had called (and paid for) a tow-truck to take my car if I hadn’t moved my stuff yet.  My stuff was already on porch, it was a short distance to the car, but try as I might to prove that I was nearly done and gone, the tow-truck drivers refused to believe me.  I begged them to see reason but they weren’t having any of it.  They hooked my car to the tow-truck and began to pull out of the drive… and I woke up.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t end here.  That dream was on a Sunday night, and so, when I awoke, I was shaken by how strange the dream was and how real it seemed.  I just sat there for a couple minutes trying to get my bearings: I wasn’t banished from my family; my car was still outside; I still had all my stuff.  Somehow I managed to pull myself together and push it all out of my mind.  Later that day, when I was walking home from class I ran into my grandmother on campus.  She works for some branch of the engineering department  and this is the first semester what we cross paths of a regular basis so I wasn’t too surprised to be running into her, but she told me that she was meeting my grandfather for dinner and that I was invited.  Of course, wanting to put off doing schoolwork and not having anything too pressing to get done, I told her I would be glad to go.  On the way there, she asked me if I had talked to my mother lately because my sister’s birthday was this week etc..  I was a little shocked that my first response which, I don’t think it came exactly in the form of words but something more, it was a general disgust that she would talk to me about my mom, a sense of ‘why would I talk to her, I’ve been banished, that ship has sailed, that bridge is burnt.’  Fortunately, I managed to get it together and explain that I hadn’t talked to my mom in a while and that I’ve been busy so I don’t really know what’s going on.  Eventually, I managed to get my shit together and realize that this was all in my head and dealt with that, but that first surge of—for lack of a better word—hate is something that was brought on by this damn dream.  If that’s not a big dream, I don’t know what is.



In a Dream of Passion

 

            Today, after only a brief mention of Conchis’s theater, a theater without an audience, I could not help but to feel the need to do some exploring of the topic of Conchis’s theater and theater in general.

  First, let us start with the image of Conchis’s theater: everyone who is around is on or behind stage.  Everyone who is watching the play at all is also a part of the production.  What is happening in the play?  Is it not the creation of another world, a world apart where “all the world” is, indeed, “a stage?”  This microcosm is a world unto itself.  How are we to say that this world, our reality, is nothing more than another stage, a microcosm of something so much larger that we cannot possible imagine? Perhaps, we are simply another production without an audience and one day, the curtain will close and that will be the unveiling.  It might seem paradoxical that the closing of the curtain might be the unveiling, but perhaps that is what it will take for us to realize our parts.

            We also encounter other kinds of stages if we look closer at The Magus.  First we see the novel itself as a stage: a platform upon which a prescribed set of actions are to take place.  All novels are, in fact, nothing more than a portable stage.  This allows one to carry a various production around with ease; on an airplane, outdoors, in the bathtub, in a box, or with a fox, the novel is the most portable version of theater.  

            Within the novel, we also see several places where stages themselves exist even if they are not, at first, obvious.  One of the first that come to mind is any place where Conchis manages to have an extended monologue.  Throughout the story, Conchis has several stories that he shares with Nicholas and whoever else is present.  These stories are presented on an impromptu platform and all Nick can do is sit and listen and ‘enjoy’ the show.  We also see the blatantly obvious dramatizations such as the initiation scene.  This production is interesting because it raises the audience and puts him (Nick) on a platform instead of, as would be expected, putting the actors (if we are, in this instance assuming Nick is not an actor) on the ‘stage.’  Interestingly, here, we see three different kinds of audience to the production.  First we have the audience which is, in fact, part of the play itself.  This ‘listeners’ that quietly sit and watch the proceedings are as much a part of the proceedings as the ‘psychologists.’  The second audience is an audience of one, Nicholas Urf and he is forced to sit through the play.  He is literally bound and gagged and forced to witness the production which continues to draw him in and convince him that he is as much a part of this as everyone else whether or not he wants to believe it or not.  The third audience is the reader of the novel.  In this case, Nick is as much of an actor as are the ‘psychologists’ or the ‘audience.’  Is this, then, a play within a play within a play?

 

These are merely some brief reflections of stages and theater, and given the breadth of the novel, it could probably extend into many of hundreds of pages, but for the constraints of time and space, I will leave this as, if nothing more, a starting point for further reflection.

Scratching the Surface

Initial Response to The Magus

            Given the breadth of this work, I am going to have to considerably limit the scope of this initial reflection and I hope to be able to set myself up for a more in depth analysis for later in the semester.  That being said, I would like to start this discussion at the same place we started the semester.  Does anyone else remember the quote that Dr. Sexson brought up on the first day of class?  Well, I do.  And since we have talked about reading too much into things, that is exactly what I am going to do.  It is my opinion that Dr. Sexson was setting us up for The Magus when he said, “What see’st though else in the dark backward and abysm of time.”  This quote, taken from Act 1 Scene 2 of the Tempest, spoken by Prospero, was, somehow, supposed to bring us both into the past and the future (I will leave an explanation for that up to Eliot).

            This is one of the ideas put forward by Nicholas Urf himself as to how we are to interpret the novel.  The Magus is, amongst other things, a retelling of The Tempest.  We are given a magician who is capable of manipulating the reality of everyone and everything in the story to his will; two lovers who are going to come together through the senex of the magician (I may have taken some liberties this term); various characters who do the magicians bidding.  However, Fowles takes his story a step further by throwing the reader into the chaos along with the characters (probably one of the reasons he opts for a first person narrative style).  The reader is, in this case, more Ferdinand than Prospero.  But by viewing the two storylines as analogous, it can help a reader reach a conclusion about what happens after the narrative has ended (if the epilogue wasn’t enough for you).  And just as Prospero asks the audience to justify the quality of the performance by applause in his Epilogue, by leaving the end of the story, for lack of a better word, unfinished, Fowles asks for something similar from his audience.

 

            These are just one of my initial responses, but I hope be able to spend some more time exploring the implications of the other Shakespearian references e.g., Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It (the copious A.Y.L.I. references also help a well-versed reader come to a conclusion about the end, as well).      

I’m So Startled

 

            It startled me to read, “If the wandering of desire did not exist, great literature would not exist either.”  This passage, near the end of the first chapter of The Secular Scripture, only a few sentences before the discussion about mazes with and without plans is something that struck me as profound in its simplicity.  Perhaps the best place to start this is a little background into my experience with Literature and English.  When I took the career aptitude test in high school, I remember only one thing about my results: on my list of top five things I should not be was “English Teacher.”  At the time, I couldn’t have agreed more, and even through the my first few semesters at the university, I would have laughed had you told me that I was going to graduate with a bachelors degree in English Literature while planning to continue onto graduate programs with the intentions of teaching Literature at the college level.  Fortunately, I had a teacher who managed to ignite something of a spark in the dark room of my understanding of literature, and things eventually took off from there.  One of my biggest problems when in High School, and before and for some time after, was understanding the point of studying English.  (The explanation of English as an art form was something that was never presented to me and was something I was forced to arrive at on my own.)  Eventually, as Dr. Sexson had his Lolita moment, I had my The Sun Also Rises moment, and well, here I am.

            That being said, I always enjoy finding something aphoristic that sums up the study of English and Literature in such simple terms.  Therefore, for lack of a better phrase, I was startled when I read this passage by Frye.  I don’t think I was startled because of some radical idea put forth by Frye, but by something simpler, the truth of it.  I don’t want to say that all Literature can be reduced to “a wandering of desire,” though I’m sure there are those who would.  Instead, I want to take a little while to explore this idea of “wandering desire.”  While this exploration is by no means comprehensive, I hope that these few notes will help explore the phrase on both the part of the Author and the Reader.

            Let us first start by exploring the wandering of the Author.  My first reaction is that the Author desires to be, among other things, able to play God and to be a god over his dominion.  By being able to use his wandering desires, he is capable of using his craft to create worlds and people that have never existed and never will exist and the Author places himself and the supreme power.  All characters and events are subject to his whim, to his story.  On a larger scale, we see desire contributing to the advancement, or modification, rather, of literature.  Over the centuries there are measurable periods of time where schools of literature can be observed, e.g., Romanticism to Victorianism to Modernism.  The desire of each school to depart form the schools that precede it help to distinguish the schools from each other and keep the evolution moving forwards. (Admittedly, I am hard-pressed to consider Modernism progress.)

            On the part of the Reader, however, I see only one desire that captures the literary mind: the desire to escape from a prescribed reality into another of the Reader’s choosing.  The fancy of the Reader is allowed free play amongst the various works of literature and to seek refuge among them from the various trouble of his or her reality.  This is the desire that drives the Reader to literature and the works that are most receptive to readers, that allow for the desire to escape to become a temporary reality, are what are considered “great literature.”

 

            While this brief analysis is incomplete and reductive (at best), the points still stand.  And though my focus is largely on prose works, and a separate work may be required to evaluate poetry, especially non-epic poetry, we can, at least, gain a starting point for discussions about (great) Literature and Desire and explore our roles as readers and writers within this framework.

Existential Crises

         After hearing Brooke's story about standing upon the top of the mountain and looking out over miles of unbroken mountains, I couldn't help but to think of a similar story that I had once written.  This story, which was printed in the Summer edition of Outside Bozeman magazine reflects many of the same realizations but takes it in a different direction.  Interestingly--or perhaps not interestingly at all--I happened to find a similar passage in The Magus.  In chapter 49, since we all seem to have different paginations, Nick reflects, "Under the silver nailparing of a moon, I felt, though without any melancholy at all, that sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give."  (Not to mention the not-so-veiled comparison of Nick to Hamlet that takes place only a few pages before the quote in question... But I will save this for another discussion I intend to have about Shakespeare and The Magus).  These seem to be three meager examples of people realizing their places in the 'scheme of things,' but I would suggest that everyone is capable of coming up with realizations of their own.  I also think that these experiences, as in the cases mentioned, are not necessarily negative as they might seem upon initial reflection.  Perhaps this is little more than a vocalization of inspiration; when one realizes how small, how insignificant, he truly is, he becomes liberated.  Only after someone has been liberated is he or she truly capable of taking the risks necessary to be truly great.  By facing insignificance and accepting it as a matter of life, can someone become an artist (in any sense of the word).  The knowledge of insignificance helps to reassure one of the repercussions of failure and precisely how nominal those repercussions are.  If I am nothing, then so to are my mistakes, my failures, my misunderstandings.  From this freedom, the artist, then, gains the courage to touch the pen to the page, the brush to the canvas, the bow to the strings.

     Since I have not yet finished The Magus, this is only speculation and one needs not worry about my spoiling the ending intentionally, but I would suggest that we will see more of this kind of realization on the part of Nick Urfe which will ultimately lead to his telling of the story that we are reading.  We will, then, complicate the story even further by having to decipher from Nick the Pilgrim and Nick the Poet.

 

The River’s Edge

        From time to time the river would expel a pronounced ‘gurgle’ as water would rush into a pocket created by the infinite droplets moving in their mysterious ways.  She listened from the bank and watched the water pass by.  Where it came from, she knew not; but she supposed that before long, it would reach the ocean and the cycle would repeat.  She leaned back; laying in the grass, she closed her eyes.  Her mind wandered back to the river’s edge and perhaps in an attempt to test the water, it trickled in and was carried along by the steady current.  At first, her vision was distorted by the water but before long, her sight became clear and the chill of the water faded from her limbs.  As she was moved down stream, she was stricken by the stone mosaic which paved the riverbed.  The irreplicable pattern paralleled the constantly distorting surface from the start to the finish, never repeating but always the same.  This was a masterpiece that could only be created by the hand of God.  She was carried farther away and here she began to take notice of the life all around her which was not visible from the surface.  At first, she saw the fishes contenting themselves to pockets of still water or holding steady under a riffle or seeking shelter among the stones, nearly invisible.  The mosaic of the river-rock continued onto their backs; every one was different and the same. But even these could not draw her attention away from the continued multitudes of creatures that followed her down the river.  She began to notice the insects that passed through the water with ease and the algae which was forever to be subject to the current’s will and the aquatic plants rooted to the riverbed perpetually waving ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to anyone who will notice.  She passed by, unseen and unheard: an extraterrestrial visitor in this strange world.  As she gazed upon these unfamiliar forms, she was struck by the mystery of it.  Not moments before, she was sitting, just above the surface, a stranger to this whole world which was mere inches from her.  Everything seemed so changed; the blindfold has been removed; the light turned on.  How could she continue when such universes exist, unseen, below her very nose?  How could anyone contemplate the infinity of the Cosmos when that very infinity was present here on Earth, contained within the head of a pin?  From under the water she heard the river gurgle louder than before; she stirred; her eyes opened.  ‘I must have fallen asleep,’ she sighed to herself; the sunny afternoon had nearly given way to the dark of the evening.  She rose and made her way back to the path from which she descended down to the water’s edge.  The river gurgled on behind her, as steady as ever.

On the Question of Quality

   I will be the first to admit that, perhaps, I ended this reflection on something of a tangent, but if ever there was a time for grandstanding, this was it. 

On the Question of Quality

            When I sat down to write this, I had the intention of being here all day in order to form a long winded argument about the quality of the University system and about how one would go about answering such questions.  Instead, after a brief consideration, I realized that the answer was both more difficult than I originally believed, and, paradoxically, simpler.  Frankly, I think the journey is equally as important as the destination in an understanding of Quality and how it is evaluated in a University setting, and, therefore, I will not spoil the ending just yet but will bid you to follow me along through my thought process as I address the question of Quality.

            The first question which must be answered (or, rather, addressed) is, “what is Quality?”  Quality judgments are ones that we make every day; from choosing which outfits we wear (a question of quality of appearance) to what we eat (qualities of taste and health) to where we choose to work or go to school (qualities of life and happiness).  These might seem a bit reductive, but the point stands.  Even in these cases, you will notice that each of these things, which are being called into question, are evaluated differently (though there are cross-over in most cases, which is why we are using the reductive model and not a more complex schematic).  By this, I mean, one does not judge an outfit by its quality of taste, or what we eat by the quality of life it produces (thought he inverse is the norm).  Each object must be evaluated by qualities that are within its means.  This leads us to the old adage of Einstein, “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”  If we place this into the University setting we arrive at: If you judge an engineer by his ability to dissect the rhetoric of Tennyson, he will live his entire life believing that he is stupid.  Within the University, there are infinite situations where this expression may be applied.  It is obvious this line of reasoning illuminates the need for a better evaluative system within the university. But where must one start? And how do we evaluate students? Faculty? Departments? Colleges? Universities as a whole?

            Let us, for simplicity’s sake, start with the simplest unit: the student.  How can we possibly evaluate even the students? Do we evaluate the freshman? the seniors? the graduates? everything in between?  And this leads back to how do we evaluate the students of one discipline against those of another?  I think we can agree that to be able to accurately do anything of the sort would be impossible.  It becomes apparent that until students can be made equally ‘rounded’ academically, the question of identifying and measuring quality is void.  Since we have moved away from the trivium and quadrivium, a move for which I am infinitely grateful, we must not attempt to compare the students for that is impossible, instead, we must address the University itself and the overall Quality thereof.  But here, I think we must only be concerned about increasing Quality as opposed to simply measuring it.  By investing in the University (in terms of money, resources, etc.) we can make it of the highest possible quality.  If the focus becomes one of increasing the Quality of our universities, we will not need to worry so much about the Quality of the students because, if the Quality of the University is truly increased, so will the Quality of the students.  A master potter and novice potter may both make pots, but the master potter, who is consistently supplied with the highest quality materials and the latest pot making techniques, will consistently turn out pots which are less likely to leak or to break than is the novice.  By investing in the University, we invest in the students. 

            All in all, I think we must address the Quality of the University before we attempt to evaluate the constituents thereof.  In a country notorious for consistently undervaluing education, we must be willing to put an end to fretting about the outcome of the University.  Instead, we must ensure that the University is consistently supplied with appropriate funds and resources to remain competitive in the fields of technology and science, humanities and arts, business and education.  By ensuring the Quality of the Universities and always striving to increase that Quality, the University will be able to become more self-sustaining by increasing department size and by being able to produce large departments which are capable of creating supervised internships in order to give students firsthand experience while being able to bring in money to the University.  In these larger departments, upper level students would be able to gain teaching experience while lowering the cost of tuition and eliminating student loans.  I believe that, with the proper resources, the University is able to reach a high enough Quality wherein it will not be only a source of higher education, but an intellectual institution and community that betters, not only itself (and therefore increases its quality from the inside), but also increases the quality of the its environs, from local schools (including Elementary/Middle/High Schools operated by the University) to providing the community with jobs both for graduates of the University as well as non-graduates.  By continually striving to increase Quality of the University System, we can effectively increase the Quality of all members of that system and the surrounding community.      

How the Past Possesses the Present in “Night-Sea Journey”

How the Past Possesses the Present in “Night-Sea Journey”

           

            When it comes down to it, John Barth’s “Night-Sea Journey” is little more than a tale of circles; and upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the humble circle and its story is something that has been passed down from generation to generation of literature.  If we take look through a brief survey of literature (and therefore, life) the theme of the circle, (a peculiar phrase, if ever there was one), makes itself amply apparent.

            In “Night-Sea Journey,” we see circles presented in multiple ways. These circles exist from the strikingly literal “gliding sphere” to the metaphorical “cyclic process of incarnation” or “cycles of catastrophes” to the phenomenological fact that, by understanding the text as a whole, the reader realized that this story is only one repetition in a series that continues ad infinitum.  Perhaps what I have developed, here, is nothing more than circular “referential mania.”  By exploring each of these concepts in turn (literal, metaphorical, phenomenological), we can gain a glimpse into the literary history of the circle and see, with little wonder, how the concept of the circle becomes so integral to the story of the “Night-Journey” and literature as a whole.

            Perhaps the simplest place to start is with the physical circle.  Chronologically, the oldest example I arrived at (through no manner of systematic examination) was from the Inferno of Dante.  What are not the levels of the Inferno if not “Circles?”  Led by Virgil, Dante progresses through the nine circles of Hell in which Dante finds rings of swamps, rivers of boiling blood, burning sand, and the eighth circle which is subdivided into eleven separate rings (Bolgias) including a ring wherein horned devils with lashes force its occupants to walk around the circle forever.  The circle also appears multiple times in Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn.”  In the first stanza, we see “twice five miles of fertile ground/ With walls and towers were girdled round.” Then, in the final stanza, “weave a circle round him thrice.”  Interestingly, both of these circles are concerned with enclosing something.  Perhaps the seeming endless nature of the circle is what makes these barriers so effective.  Within the circle, there are no corners and no weak spots.  Because of the symmetrical and perfect nature of a circle, each point or segment is equal to any other point or segment of equal length and to follow a circle will lead on forever without landing on any end point and continue into infinity.  This idea of continuity of a circle is also seen in Marcel Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu, Swann’s Way and The Guermantes Way (walking paths) seem to a young Marcel two distinct paths each with its own character and significance; but with age, Marcel learns that these two Ways are simply the same circle taken from two different directions.  The same confusion can be seen in Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” when mysterious caller continues to call the wrong number on the rotary phone.  The circular dialing device leads to confusion because the caller, presumably, can’t seem to get the proper point on the circle.  By confusing the “O” and the zero, (both circles) on the circle of the rotary the caller is lost in the circle.  Within a circle, either direction from any given point is identical and therein lies the terror of the circle: any point is as good as another, but when one finds himself stuck in (or on) a circle and must move, the overwhelming sameness of the circle is awe-inspiring, intimidating, confounding, exhilarating, and capable of devastating the human need for reference.  If one starts in a certain direction, he may travel into infinity before he realizes his mistake.  This potential for failure also makes the circle a symbol of great power, for if one is to start moving around the circle in the correct direction, then also will he travel into infinity in that direction.  We, as the readers, can imagine the island of the “Night-Sea Journey,” and after we realize that the narrator and protagonist is, himself, a sperm, we can see the shape of his counterpart: the round ovum.  In the circle is contained the infinity of life, and therefore, the swimmer’s instincts drive him forward, towards the circle, while his consciousness continues to make arguments against the circle (including the fact that the circle might not exist).  The swimmer attempts to use his limited perspective to understand his place in the cycle of life and death.  This circle of life, and cycle of life and death, falls into the category of the metaphorical circle.

            The following two categories are perhaps two of the most important concepts in literature.  Without them, it is my opinion that literature would not be capable of playing the social role that it does.  The metaphorical circle is a concept which is manifest in all literature, including the “Night-Sea Journey.”  These type of circles may not be as obvious as the literal circles, but can be seen working throughout all stories.  One of the oldest examples of an in-story cycle that is glaringly obvious is the myth of Sisyphus.  King Sisyphus boasted that he was cleverer than Zeus himself; as punishment for his hubris, Zeus condemned Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a large boulder up a hill, but before he can reach the top, the boulder rolls to the bottom and Sisyphus must start over again.  Here is another example of circular punishment, a motif which was amply apparent in Dante’s work.  The circle works so well for punishment because of its inherent infinity.  This is what is so unsettling about circles, the infinity, the infinite loop.  Another common cycle that presents itself in literature and mythology is the resurrection, the cycle of life and death portrayed on a scale small enough to be employed as a literary device.  Death and rebirth is seen from Homeric epics, to the Christian mythology, to The Ballad of Tim Finnegan, to the Harry Potter story.  In the case of the “Night-Sea Journey,” we see nearly all of the swimmers drown during their quest and, as readers we understand that through a literal birth, the quest (or the swim) will one day start over anew.  This concept of a quest is also a common theme in the romances of the middle ages.  How many times has the “Knight Errant” defeated one foe and immediately set out after another?  Even in parody (e.g., Cervantes’s Don Quixote) the knight will face one task, save one damsel, and immediately pursue another challenge.  Sounds very similar to the concept of the Mario video game, doesn’t it?  No matter what obstacles are overcome, the quest beckons.  In T.S. Eliot’s For Quartets, the idea of cycles and resurrections become strikingly apparent.  From the first and last sentences of “East Coker,” “In my beginning is my end” and “In my end is my beginning,” to, in “Little Gidding,”  

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.  

 

These two passages could both be directly applied to the N.S.J..  The swimmers quest ultimately both begins and ends when he reaches the island.  The island is his beginning and his end.  He arrives, himself, on the island for the first time, but is it the first time?  I think we can say that it certainly is not, and that even though this isn’t the first time, the exploration is just beginning.  Another of the most inherent themes of the Four Quartets involves continued references to the seasons.  What are seasons, if not a continually repeating cycle?  These are all examples of circles that have manifested themselves from the past, through the literature of thousands of years, and both used the N.S.J. to manifest itself, and to continue to move the tradition onwards.

 

            The final cycle of this analysis is what I referred to as the phenomenological circles.  Viewing the text, and the story as a whole, we, the readers, understand that the end of the swimmer’s journey is only the beginning of a second (or a unit in an infinite series of) N.S. J.’s.  One of the most obvious parallels to this concept of phenomenological cycles is Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.  In order to properly finish the novel, one must also read the first sentence again.  And as simple as that, the reader has begun to read the novel for a second time and cycle (theoretically) continues ad infinitum.  This same idea, though not as glaringly obvious, is seen in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman where, at the end of the novel, we, the readers, realize that this story is simply on a loop and we’re not exactly sure what number of the loop we have been privy to in the novel, perhaps one, perhaps all of them.  And to trace this forward through history a little further, we arrive at the film, Dead Man, which, in my opinion is some sort of hybrid of The Third Policeman and Dante’s Inferno.  Is William Blake’s journey simply a journey around one of the rings of Dante’s Hell, fated to begin anew after the viewer (I was half-tempted to write reader) has left the scene?  I think the answer is yes.  Just as the swimmer is on the infinite loop that he suspects, so is William Blake, so is the narrator (whose name we never learn) of The Third Policeman, so is the reader of Finnegans Wake.  The loop, set in motion by these stories, never stops for the reader.

           

            I think it is unfair to consider the past as possessing the present in the “Night-Sea Journey” as a culmination.  It needs to be viewed as a process, a process that existed and took place before, during, and after the story.  It is the circle that is life and literature.  Without these circles, literature would not be possible.  In a universe without circles and cycles, an event might only occur once; every event might only occur once and therefore, the only books that would be written are history books.  That is not the universe in which we live, no is it the universe in which I want to live.  Our universe, fortunately, is composes of circles and cycles, and perhaps only one circle that plays itself into infinity.  By writing and rewriting these cycles the Reader is able to tap into these cycles, whether consciously or not, and relate.  Without the ability to relate, there would be no literature.  I cannot say that I subscribe to the idea of stories being part of the human biology.  Stories are not inherent.  Instead, we have concepts, like the circle, that are inherent in every story.  From the story that will never be written, to epics, to airport novels, some concepts will never be left out.  The circle and cycle will never be left out of stories and that is what makes it seems inherent to our biology.  Barth’s “Night-Sea Journey” is one of the stories that propagate the motif of universal circle and cycle of life and death.  It is a link on the evolutionary chain that is literature.  The past possesses the present and then moves on, and “Night-Sea Journey” is no exception.   

          

Displaced Fairy Tale

Displaced Fairy Tale

            The rain ran down the pane of the floor-to-ceiling window in Walter’s office.  It was days like these that he would stand near the glass and look down and imagine that he was one of the raindrops: falling, falling.  He had been the vice president of D&H Investment Strategies for nearly ten years, and his prospects for climbing any higher seemed non-existent.  About two years ago, The Board of Directors found itself unhappy with direction the company was going and in response, replaced the existing CEO with one Stanley King, a great-nephew of one of the oldest members of The Board.  Mr. King had a keen eye for business and had worked wonders for the company, but despite these ‘improvements,’ all the senior members of the staff felt cheated by this act of nepotism.  For weeks, it seemed that things would continue as business as usual, but slowly, Mr. King, backed by the board, began eliminating the members of upper-management and replacing them with out-side hires.  He started at the top, moving down, slowly, slowly.  Before long, each member knew when his time was up, it was only a matter of time, and Walter’s number had been up for weeks.

            It was on this rainy morning, the city was as grey as ever, and from his window he watched, through the rain-streaked glass, the grey building, the grey cars, and the grey people moving down below.  His mind jumped back to his desk, the top left drawer.  He knew it was locked and his hand moved instinctively down to his right pocket to feel for his key-ring, on which he knew the little desk key was securely attached.  He hadn’t touched the pile of work on his desk all morning.  From his empty house, to the company lease, through the revolving door, and up the elevator his thoughts had been in that desk drawer.

            The static from the inter-com cut the air, “Walter, Mr. King would like to see you in his office.”  He didn’t say anything.  He kept looking out the window.

            From outside of Walter’s office, the receptionist and the few people who happened to be walking by were stopped by the bang and the flash and heard his body fall upon the floor with a pronounced thud after the thunder of the blast.  They rushed to the office, and called 911; but try as they might, he was lost before they even reached the door.  The paramedics arrived after a couple minutes; Walter was pronounced dead and carried down the elevator and into the grey world.