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.