Time and the Diffusion of Truth

The problem with didacticism is that it tends to diffuse and dissolve with time. Things as important as "don't scald yourself" or "don't lay under carts" become obvious, trivial and even humorous in their prominent evidence. These days advising someone to avoid scalding themselves on hot water is silly because of how so ingrained and incontrovertible it has become in our culture.

Another example of truth and logic being sepparated from useful information and becoming insignificant items of pointlessness is a story I had written earlier this year. It centers around a horrible event that took place long ago that destroyed an island. In my story it was several decades or even hundreds of years later and the ghostly remains of the island had become little more than a tourist trap. With no historical evidence of the event, it became all hearsay, and propigated itself as an unfounded rumor, rather than authentic fact. As with Atlantis, what could have been is not no more, and without propper literature placing the event in the real, we can only assume such places never existed outside human imagination.

Self-Affirming Textualality

I know, I know. Too much Quixote. But I realized something that I hadn't previously; the book itself is an extension of the ideas encapsulated within Don's mind. Don is constantly attributing truth as an important factor for nobility and chivalrous values. One major moral, I think, is that truth is not necessarily better than fiction. D.Q. thinks the stories in his books to be real, an obvious folly in the world in which he lived, but Cervantes tells us that so fantastic and unrealistic a story, told about Don Quixote is a factual account not to be taken as fancy (or at least he tells us so in the first part of the book).

For the sake of the story itself, Cervantes writes it as if were one of Don's own books--an epic story of a knight errant, but Quixote is decidedly not one (as far as I've read, I'm still reading the second book), and the general unbelievability of his madness, and the serendipitous nature in which everyone stopping at the inn that fateful knight (when the barber and curate tried to take Don home) knowing each other in some way or another.

There is the chapter in which Donny Q argues against the pedantic canon's claims that the romantic tales of chivalry are nothing more than fiction meant for writers to write about fantastic and impossible characters. Of course, Don is offended and talks of chivalry being didactic and true, while, ironically and hypocritically, Cervantes' story is, for all intents and purposes, fictitious.

A Poetic Detour

This has little to do directly with topics and ideas discussed in class, but we all know one could make contrived and vague connections towards such. I'm understandably concerned that using the internet as a forum for displaying my most recently revised epic (see: long) poem may lead to people using my work as their own. HOWEVER the library of congress' copyright website states that "Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is cre­ated in fixed form." That is, the second you make something original, it's copyrighted. This means no reproducing, performing, displaying or distributing without my permission (though I don't suspect any of my fellow classmates of doing such so much as random internet surfers, if they should perchance to happen upon my sad little blog).

I've worked an enormous amount on this in revision, conception, etc. and am merely looking for feedback from my English peers, if anyone has a suggestion or comment for me. It started as a parody of "Don Juan" by Lord Byron, and so randomly talks off-topic, insults literary figures, and even in a specific stanza ("I want not a hero...") directly emulates a stanza from Byron's epic canto. I also use a few older words, since I decided to adapt the poem to fit into a earlier time period that can't be immediately identified. Such as using "err" in the older sense of random meandering, not direct error.

It has since become something much more: a fun narrative I've come to love. It is by far my favorite piece of work produced to date, and I am modestly proud of it.While the language may be less poetic in parts that I would have hoped, I tended to put most of my focus in writing it on the sound of the poem when read or spoken; the rhythm of the lines, the flow of pronouncing sentences, and a particular focus to the sound of the alliteration and the general repetition of multiple similar sounds in each line. It was crafted with some painstaking concentration, and, ironically, as Byron's poem, it has become my masterpiece. However, not to be outdone, I actually completed my poem. (Ooh! Sick literary burn!) It is LONG. To the extent that it may be physically harmful. It is around 3,400 words, so take that into careful consideration before reading.

Here I write, with far better things to do
Than be writing—several items come to mind;
An opiate dream perhaps poetic whims pursue—
Faking prose and verse while I, in kind,
May sit upon this hazy Thames and ride
While mind and matters flow wide with the tide.

I could take it on my cheery bliss
To turn keen-stirred sights to alcohol,
Imbibe flustered fangs and searing kiss.
Ah, of sweetest sauce, to thee I call!
But no virtue, vice nor cannabis
Could further fix this fancy at all.
A man as I would yield such yarn well,
Though, unlike most men, in truth shall I tell.

See here that I hold a calm, steadied hand;
Mind, body, spirit—all working tonight.
See here that (for once) sobriety was planned
As to scrounge a means to scribe this story right,
Perch eyes and sit ears to my tale-spinning and
Soon you shall come to know of my plight.
In spite this lack of inebriation,
I pray shall bolster my motivation.

I have incredible incredibility.
Believable, this is no stretch of truth—
Here shall I absolve the myth of my ability;
By exchange of words I shall soon set loose
Upon your patient ears humility
So that I might not paint myself uncouth.
So that the chains of truth may carry no rust,
Let me claim, in my eyes, this venture unjust.

A town in a valley, when I care to listen
Can hear still the sounds of that villa I covet.
Though, due to events, my love since did lessen.
Sweet scene in the winter! Woe, did I love it!
Serene in the winter? Now here’s a lesson:
Who’er thought “beauty's truth” can go shove it.
I once loved the whiteness with various reason.
Whatever the case, I now ire the season.

Sixty-two months had I lived in that place
(Sixty-one I recall being pleasant).
I knew the town well, planting names to each face
That passed on our dimly-waked crescent.
Back then life was a laugh strolled at snails-pace
While the rest of the world grew cold and incessant.
There did I craft (as all craftsmen should)
My best bakes as a baker, and I was damn good.

Here I shall wander off-topic for brief
Random remark on a subject so dim
That scant men have heard, yet ‘tis my belief
He who knows naught for baking forever knows sin.
So that my soul finds some short form of relief—
Though for eight miles spinning I have yet to begin.
I’m certain by now your impatience is swelling.
Forgive intermission—this, too, is worth telling.

Some chefs may argue that cooking is art
While others, convinced, shout out “science,” opposed.
Having a kinship hence ripped apart,
Slamming many a kind and once-friendly door closed.
All art is science, and is science not art—
Both calling each other in craft, I propose
Art can be structured, and meant to inform
And, surely, there’s beauty where numbers perform.

Think what you will—art and science come one.
Practitioners certain may sear with such skill
That dough, spun on skin, kneaded and done,
Rise out from the oven as if their own will.
The gap twixt those skilled and those with skills none
Strictly follows this fact, if you will:
Those thinking to cook is to practice one school
Lack all form, vision, tact and are ever the fool.

I want not a hero—the sandwich, perhaps.
Though what tale could be told without just a few?
After cloying my brain short of mental collapse
My aged mind discovers that no man will do!
All yawning stories feature the boring synapse
of a hero, a villain and some trite daring-do.
But be this not a yarn—’tis all true confession
Of fact, void of hoax, pulled from my collection.

The fact is, my story is in no need of persons
To detail or scribe seven stanzas from now;
He’d start in good spirits then gradually worsen.
He’d be faced with a problem he conquers somehow.
Yet vainly he rides and dies off to the worst end.
Postlude his mother, drowning her brow.
Deadened and dripping, no vitals or pulse.
Oh, what an ending! Oh, that it weren’t false.

Heroes are fake; something penned in a book
With intention to deftly inspire
So that people, pathetic, in need of faith look
For that next strand of hope they might blindly desire.
I, by God’s grace, exposed truths I once took
That fueled towards those false figures my ire.
To have not a hero’s a problem quick-solved:
A good enough writer keeps villains involved.

Not that I scribe with a story line laid out,
Antagonist plucked from my person’s behest.
Let emphasis sway, laying rest all your doubt,
Mused not from some choir of angels’ request—
Though I must admit I’m far from devout,
I still pray I might tempt all doubt to rest.
I swear to be true, and embellish I shan’t
Simply sit in belief to the tale I recant.

Fall stains the world in a wondrous way
Leaving it naked after all’s said—
Giving such color with so great array,
Birthing such beauty, then leaving for dead...
Autumn year-round is a thing I can say
I would joyously treasure and cherish, and yet
As to a lion may be thorn or splinter,
So does my story start en medias winter.

So here I’ll begin, in the town known as Locks,
Sunk deep in the winter, still trembling with life.
When thin sheets of snow veil the meadows and rocks
And one’s breath cuts the air like a finely-tuned knife.
But soon was that town delivered a pox
Of unfair disaster and great, undue strife.
If only back then we knew that we were in
for the villain named Death, who shall follow herein.

Death lacks this world, less some Earthly force guides
It to pity or plunder or viciously haul
Some sweet soul from its threads, ere that soul hides
From its cruelty; creeping and harsh, breadth touching all.
Death strangles perception and pierces our lives
As our bodies decay and descend to a crawl.
Death is our king, and so rare leaves its throne,
But to smother our town, here Death acted alone.

How this all began is a quandary of great
Concern, but one thing I know is for certain:
Not by some chance but unwavering fate
Hid from our eyes by some sick, unseen curtain,
Springing, impacted and lured out our hate,
Turning our blissful existence to burden.
If survivors be found, they would tell you the same:
The beginning is doubtless—the mute was to blame.

His background was lack—a past no one knew,
Though his life, at the time, most people knew well;
A mute and a cripple with one leg askew.
A poor lot to tend, as I’m sure he would tell
Us if only he could (and I’m sure he wished to).
But if not for the mute the peace shan’t have fell.
It might not have been completely his fault,
But regardless, much life was still forced to a halt.

Now set the scene—I remember it clearly;
Our tavern, “The Blue,” and I deep in thinking,
telling barista, quite hotly, to “beer me.”
I did not see the mute (eye-deep in drinking)
At the time, ‘till my head lifted drearily,
Scanning the room, unintentionally blinking.
‘Til, unconscious, my eyes fell at his feet
Just as he, rising, took leave of his seat.

Then this mute, blessed beyond a form deformed
Awed the room, catching whispers in his wake.
Shocked he all, espousing loud: “Be warned,
Sick fools! My lust is birthed to satiate!
Upon your weak heads and necks shall be adorned
My wicked rights imposed on those worth least!
In licking sin shall feast and under I shall spill
Perfect blood in perfect pitch ‘til all is perfect will.”

Then collapsed he, slumping down upon a chair.
Mute no more, he howled and tightly clenched his chest.
He prayed to God for but one last gasp of air,
Drew a breath and died, God granting his request.
The people to which he spoke were quite unaware
The urgency in tone with which the mute addressed.
‘Tis true, for all the crowd thereafter talked
Was how rare his Death, of which they mocked.

And so it was, in truth, this man heard God;
How this, I wondered at great length, could be.
This simple crippled mute, this boorish sod,
For God to choose to speak of all to he?!
The man worth least, with life so greatly flawed.
Or was it that he held great reverie?
Yea, for the simple I have heard
God oft will choose to gift his word.

Not that I am of any greater worth;
Being pious is something I ne’er could do.
In fact, I’ve grown to frankly hate the church—
My rising breads the only mass I e’er tend to.
A man of the cloth, if that cloth be skirts
Of young, nubile ladies, to which shall I woo.
But I admit thoughts of the bees and the birds
Flew out of my mind when the mute spoke those words.

As much as I hate to admit it, all I
Could ponder, though ever so deep in my glass,
Soused in my thinking, was Death, by-and-by.
Soaking my liver each night as time passed
Through fingers and flames as if I’d run dry.
I sought through drunk mirrors and eventually asked
Why he who spoke nary a word and had sung
Nary a song impulsed so quick a tongue.

So hard have I hurt from indulging the sentiment
Of unjust a God who would forcibly wangle
A marionette of free will and of sentient
Thought to provoke and enticingly tangle
A man without family, friends or tenement
To pointlessly channel some curious angle.
Yet, despite pessimism, I feel in this case
That God’s will will work in mysterious ways.

A fortnight and then some had set on our town
Just as the talk of the mute man had waned
And rumors were said of the worrisome gown
Some cold-footed bride threw away in the rain,
While the poor groom-to-be heard hearsay of "drown"
(I never did figure how he maintained).
A search party sought and effectively ceased
When found they the bride, in quintessence, deceased.

In stillness she lay as we gathered to meet;
Most the town brought babbled murmurs of rape.
Neither bonnet nor blouse nor shoes for her feet.
She, naked completely, contorted in shape,
We swore ‘twas an angel enlaced in thick sleep.
Though, curious, cracked in disjoint at the nape.
High did I hold such lament for the dead.
Daily I pine this visage from my head.

Then the panic unveiled our innermost dreads
As spoke out one and then many a man
Reminding us words of "weak necks and heads,"
But most felt it dull to indulge in such plan
And thus turned our thoughts to our lives (or our breads).
So most soon forgot in so short of a span,
Turning deaf ears and averting blind eyes.
Ignorance false, we returned to our lives.

Still drank I, more often than not, than I should
'Til six days had passed with scarce happen of freak
Events ‘til a man came to town from the wood
Screeching of some horrid scene, err near the creek.
Enticed, all, we traced task as best as we could
'Til set sights a scene that squeezed stomachs weak.
Take care to this—I implore you to heed it;
If light be your nerves, I urge you: don’t read it.

It haunts me far worse that that girl’s mangled neck.
He, brutally bloodied, interlaced with the tree.
No discern of his innards from that of the wreck;
Entrails entwining, nameless face thinned in three,
Languished in spatter, abundant in speck,
Boundlessly mazed within trunk and debris.
In confident credit we all felt at last
The menacing mantic had thus come to pass.

But, torrid inside, we feigned it away,
Bribing inklings that in so pastoral place two
Mutilations were rare and thus would display
Not one sincere notion of what could ensue.
So we, paying no slight (as such was our way),
Felt frauding the case as pure chance ought to do.
That pitiful doctrine would promptly give out
When soon set in motion arrest to our doubt.

Sporadic inspiration sudden strikes me
To fade from this saddening tale I have hurled,
And worsened your day, no doubt, to depress thee...
The phrase “I would not miss it for the world”—
I implore your attention to please bear with me
That from out this annoyance a gem shall be pearled.
And so, yet again, I fall in my habit
To toss out a thought in the hopes you might grab it.

...For if but the world I would loose some great gift
And thus own the world in all of its facets
Would not then I still own the item I missed?
For own I the world and all in its mass. It’s
Brazen to think with so quirky a twist
(I no longer fear the contempt or the casket).
Yet, less objection, I’ve undoubtedly shown
I have ne’er a reason to miss something I own.

I doubt that objections be brought to my door,
As one-side discourse is the premise of late.
To write, I confess, holds some simple allure
When to talk, face-to-face will spark heated debate.
Oft out from these quarrels come vents I abhor
When harsh far-flung fists kiss the side of my face;
My personal thoughts far more fun to report
When criminal critics can never retort.

Repetition becomes me; here I remind
The shifting in mood to renewed talk of gore.
If thus far you have found my details unkind
Take care not to drudge further on, I implore.
Lest too weak of heart that would sooner take blind
Than read in disgust and endure murder more.
So “suspend disbelief,” as some jerk once said,
That, if so inclined, please read on then, instead.

The sole site in Locks (and by no small extent),
For traders and craftsmen to peddle their goods,
Setting shop under awning, umbrella and tent,
Squalling of trinkets, tawdry baubles and foods,
At peak bulk rousing mints to fall and be spent,
Finding all in high Sunday and corking in mood,
Is market square, bustling, eclipsed with decorum,
Bartering swaps ‘round domain of the forum.

Vexation of bites... a small worry that teethes
Is spilled through these veins whilst I must recollect
View lucid, and thus am I put ill-at-ease.
Sudden breached an affair of acrid intent.
As King Richard the Third once spoke, if you please,
That “now is the winter of our discontent.”
So harsh my skin flinches in gathering thought
To retell such a tale I rather would not.

It troubles me, true, to recall such an act:
Swift heard I a scream that enticed me to turn
As a man told his friend to let off his back—
That his play was too much not to garner concern.
So great was their tiff that he called it “attack,”
And, trembling in tone, confessed that it burned.
When freed of the grasp (once three men stopped the qualm),
Born ill of his back stood the mark of a palm.

So now here in the square, in front of us all,
Something wrong beyond wrong I witnessed in stare.
The view that I had (though I’m not really small)
Would have scaled at great length if I had but a chair;
Obscured by the throng so enticed in the thrall,
The diligent droves stood staunch in the square.
In spite of this, still, I did manage to sight
The start of the end and the herald of night.

“His friend,” I have said, and it seems out of place
That so key a person (it makes me quite sore),
Could evade all my eye, and obstruct his own face;
Concealed in the crowds and the coif that he wore.
But the final affair I’ll reveal at my pace,
(Though slow it may be, I still aim not to bore)
Was the grimace he donned whilst rising above
And the state of his skin, a loose lack thereof.

Haggard, disheveled, red rot full of grit.
Stood after the tussle a monstrous new sin:
Bones burst from muscle—grotesque, I admit—
Faceless and twisted in sinew and skin.
How he transmuted, too much for my wit.
His forearm ablaze, encrusted with trim,
Flaked-off in black bits as his fingers burned red.
I knew I should run, but just stood there instead.

He quit from the ground and then, arching his back,
Shrieked a screech that the sirens should think it so loud.
His flexing and crooking culled with a crack.
My nerves in suspense—just a face in the crowd.
His posture reordered, as if to attack,
But we lemmings just stood there, impregnably cowed.
Sudden and stirring taxed a brief interject;
With withering lyric it spoke: “imperfect.”

Then erupted a scene I knew in my heart
Was ordained since the mute took leave of his chair—
Or further back still that this cease had its start.
Regardless, the moment that word hit the air
Eightcount—no, nine (hard to keep them apart)
Bodily dagger-laced ropes set off to tear
Out at the others—those sick leashes, so strange.
(But as luck would have it, I was out of their range.)

Through red-wringing ruckus the creature ascended,
Belting once more a curdling bawl. Then it
Pulsed with white froth and, somehow suspended,
Hung still for a moment, a pendulum’s pit.
An explosion of blood! People flew, rended!
What pilfered my pelt to preserve was my wit;
Blood flogged to my feet and fancied to run,
No longer dumbfounded, I found I’d been dumb.

The butchered lay sprawled from the sordid attack,
Stirring my feet through fleshed comets of ash.
Cadavers careened with such constant impact
My hotfooted hurdle became rather rash
As the rocketing corpses flew in attack
To decimate windows and walls in their crash.
By chance, in my gait I gaped the sky,
Entombing my hopes I might leave there alive.

The air burned with blood and concocted a cloud,
Unending expanse and cruel crimson in hue,
A violent, tumultuous, unsettled sound
Corrupted the sun, an assassin to blue.
Sky-killing heights of this cold callous crowd
Had blackened all sight, but veiled not what I knew;
While scraping my mind I recalled that in Locks,
A land locked by water, it harbored our docks.

Searching frenzied fevered sprinting, my eyes strained
To see the square—smothered sight bore lay to waste.
The cloud ate all, and through dull set drips restrained,
I glimpsed it gorging, ingesting all it chased.
I arrived at the wharf, with self dire drained,
And with panicking oar, I departed, posthaste.
Then, after numerous knots, I guarantee
All earth eaten by cloud and swallowed at sea.

After wickedly wasted lifetimes and weeks
I swept onto land and a port not yet seen,
God’s arms cradled my boat in high, rolling peaks.
Now accounting to sailors what once had been,
Marveling mariners whenever I speak,
Disinclined, for a pint I'd fashion the scene.
Yarning to port-comers, for all that it’s worth,
The things that I'd seen and that Hell on our Earth.

The end of my days as a body draws near.
Four decades I’ve lived in this fair-weather port
Imparting the past when invested with beer
Of the days, last of Locks (in slurring retort).
This routine was my life for forty-one years.
With ragged regard, I love liquor, in short.
So that, might I guiltlessly further imbibe,
I sit here in silence, transfixed in my scribe.

Here I wrote, with far better things to have done.
In turning this tale was I brought to the brink.
From fifty stanza's length, my verity spun;
A call for fresh booze and fine spirits, I think.
With mind eased at rest and toiled turmoil done,
I shall halt with the pen and return to my drink.
But, alas, I feel rise on my neck of my hair
Whenever a patron takes leave of his chair.

Alex Emery | 12/8/08

Don and Dumber

All right, I'll be off the Don Quixote blogs here in a second. But I noticed today a very interesting parallel; Donny Q. and Sancho P. are in many ways reminiscent (though Cervantes, assuredly, came first) of Harry and Lloyd in "Dumb and Dumber." They are two innocent, likable guys who only real crime is the overall lack of knowledge of the real, working world. They are unemployed, see the world as something far different from what it truly is, and are living their lives in accordance to what the world seems to be like to them.

While Sancho Panza may be the smartest of the bunch, he still is faulted for following so insane a man, and eventually believing with similar fervor the chivalrous didactic reasoning that pervades poor Don's reality. While the modern movie characters prove to be dissimilar (they don't have the wherewithall to understand the reality of the world, living in obliviousness, in a truer sense that Mr. Q), they still tend to conform their actions to the events they assume are unfolding.

When assaulted and thrown asunder by a complacent windmill, Don Quixote insists his cruel tormentors, be they necromancer or a gang of rogue enchanters, had transmogrified the giants to windmills. When Harry and Lloyd are told by a bus of scantily-clad women they're seeking two oil boys to join them on tour, the two point them in direction of the nearest town, their absolute logic of the reality being that the women could not have meant them. While Don (and the increasingly convinced Sancho) is guilty of the sin of illusion and misinterpretation of reality, Harry and Lloyd are guilty of sheer lack of sense of the world.

Don Qui-ha-ha-xote

I'm a little disjointed. I understand the overall importance of Don Quixote as a didactic narrative of the world and of literature and/or literary criticism, but I'm somewhat unsettled that we haven't talked about the marvelous, affluent and ironic sense of humor that so pervades the novel. It helps make the unordinant amount of reading more tolerable, but also serves to advance a reader's love for the book. I smile. I laugh. Out loud. In the quiet study section of the library. People turn to look at me and I apologize without further noise.

Never since a few humorous parts of various other stories or writing specifically made for laugh-based pleasureable reading (Dave Barry, etc.) have I had so literal a "good time" reading a book. Don Quixote is no pharmakos. He is no tragic figure. He is a comic hero. He forces smile and joy at the ironic mistakes of peasants for beautiful maidens, a neglected old horse for the elegant and deserved steed of the righteous knight. True, we may find musings of humor in his less fortunate mistakes that end in bodily harm for our poor may Spaniard, invoking the universal spirit of humor from others' misfortune. He may exibit the commonalities of a scapegoat, but his character, self-deluded truimphs and innocent nature make him so much more lovable as a person, outside the ridicule and rediculous harm upon his person, that I dare say he is far too beloved by his audience of readers that he transcends the idiom of pharmakos.

The Fantastic Mind of Don

Don Quixote is a beautiful mind. I envy, desire and wish to aspire to such perfect delusion. His world is the absolute sublime. When he recieves the ever-approaching effect of his constantly deficient attempts at true chivalrous acts, he misconcieves the causes of his failure as the works of some vendettously malicous necromancer that turns giants to windmills and armies into dust. He does not, however see inn turn to castle through any sort of phasmagorical, selectively attributing any illusion that benefits his version of reality as fact, not a mystical enchantment.

A real-world comparison would be the arrival of Spanish ships on foreign ports. Circumstantially, we are told that when the first huge boats and galleons arrived, the natives where supposedly unable to see them for their minds could not comprehend something so unknown, so dislike anything they knew of in their world. Don's sheer will to live in so elevated an era, simply refuses, or perhaps cannot process the possibility for reality to be anything less.

The Experience of Tangents

Tangents (no, not dark-skinned gentlemen) are essential to didacticism. Without meandering thought, delving intellectual stimulation, general brainstorming and imaginative exploration, how can we learn? Without experience, we retain our innocence and in that sense we also deprive ourselves of the wealth of worldly knowledge. If not for (often topic- or subject-focused) expression through apparently nonlinear thinking, we would never learn a thing.

We must be inspired by experience, and even going off on a tangent is a moment of blisfull experience. Every way in which a person may express thoughts is an invaluable tool of both literature and the general human experience. Poetry is a way of exploring the inner schemes of mind, man, nature and the existential state. I would argue that tangents are a form of stream-of-consciousness profoundly manifested in oral tradition. All forms of words are important, indispensable and infinitely intragle to didactic experience.

The Victory of Don

When Don, the wonderful cad, he, decided to save the captured "maiden" as he thought was being kidnapped by the monks on horseback, drawing her carriage he was accosted and challenged by a very unusual foe. This is a very important encounter as it is the first that Don Quixote doesn't completely fail at. Not only does he seem to be an apparent equal in combat, Quixote, though by chance and folly, ends up defeating this man, and leaves his fate to the "rescued" woman.

Not only was this man a proper challenge to Don, he is also somewhat distant from reality. He attacks Don at the insistence that he is, indeed, a gentleman. He defends his honor in a way that reflect the same chivalrous values of Quixote's delusional world. Significant and strange it is that the first person who seems to share similar values to the wonderfully confused Don his first true success, especially in Quixote's mind.

Nature, Ahoy!

I think it could be sufficiently argued that a major theme of this course would be nature, or how man deals with nature and mankind's own relationship with it. The natural world is constantly emphasized, either as a pastoral scene of the romance mode or as something no longer being the container but the thing contained or the tight relationship between innocence and the themes prevalent in nature (especially in children's literature) or as something poets aspire to imitate through mimesis or the personified envious tropes exemplified in Wallace Steven's poem. The Mythos of Seasons is a perfect example; the conciseness with which the analogies are aligned show perfects a direct and significant relationship between literature and nature, which I think can be found in just about everything we've discussed thus far and remains to be the underlying idea behind this class—that nature an literature may indeed be inexorably bound to one another.

Touchstone.

For my "keystone" passage, that I often find myself coming back to is a little poem by Robert Frost called Desert Places from a collection of works known as "A Further Range."

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Mostly it is the last stanza that interests me. It means a lot to me because it holds tight to many of my personal thoughts, of the divine and the common, the intrinsic and extrinsic, internal and external, inner-human thought and capacity versus the outer possibilities of the stars. It both marvels and recoils at the ambivalent duality of nature, the apparent horror and ecstasy of nature as it occurs in the world (Earth) and eventually muses the stars themselves for inspiration. The poem has a tone of both admiration and discomfort towards the solitude and isolated state of nature, and finally sets the gaze of the poet inwards, reflecting that for all the wonder and unpleasantness of nature external, the inner workings of the human mind will always be the more complex and worrisome.

Plot, Character and Negative Capability

Having so recently become a writer, I have been struggling with creating action, tension and a forward-moving plot. Today we touched on negative capability, negating or losing the sense of self as an author so that the work "speaks for itself." I only recently developed a new method of writing. I used to write with plot at the forefront and choosing characters to act out the plot I intended, but it made a lot of my characters simple, one-dimensioned and easily exchangeable with no unique qualities. Now I have been writing by developing the characters first, outlining a plot, but rather than having a 100% set outline, I have a series of events I desire to take place. Now I simply but my characters who I have created with their individual characteristics and personalities and try to honestly convey how I feel the characters would react to that situation, based on who they may be.
This ability to remove my personal affections and supplant the text with only my characters', I may dissolve myself in the story, giving all rhetoric, actions, motivations and philosophies live through my characters only. I have been putting parts of myself in each of my characters, but hopefully the remainder of their conscious selves will overpower the few quirks of my own that I have spread throughout my cast. It is hard to distance myself from my own writing as I find more and more of myself in my works or more and more of my works manifested in myself, but I feel that being able to take no preference and look objectively at the themes and ideas present within one's own writing helps let the characters take control of what is being expressed and meant, not the authors. To reiterate, as said in class, it is not Shakespeare who said anything, but his characters.

Lies

I just slayed a dragon. Then I flew around the Earth and defeated China. That is, of course a lie. Why would I do that? Because in everything (especially literature) the truth is generally not as exciting as a fib. It is not a lie that attempts to detract from the truth, soiling its user with filthy guilt and unceasing moral decay, that I speak of, but the lies I tell every day to my friends to make them laugh. Did that hilarious coincidence happen or did something like it almost happen, and I merely chose to embelish the reality with a little "interest cusioning." It may not be that what I could have claimed happened, but in tweaking the facts of event, I can make people laugh at an otherwise pointless story, or enthrall people with the wonders of an amazing occurrence when, in actuallity, it never did occurr. When do we take these lies to be good? When is ever any lie, whether it has malice or entertainment as its intention, good?

I regret to say I cannot remember the name, but a movie with a lying old dying father and his son coming to terms with his father's death and the seemingly inability for the father to stop telling tall tales details the wonders of the imagination over the simplicity and uneventful nature of reality. Reality is only as real as we make it out to be. For all intents and purposes, lying makes things better in this manner; the truth may be more didactic, but the genuine interest in reality is minor in its appeal. Like Don Quixote, the world within a lie, even a delusional one, is far better than the norm. And, like Shelley, I would argue that a lie is even greater than the truth in that our sullen, sod-like sad state of this brazen world is far inferior to the would-be myth of the Illiad, graphic novels, faerie tales and other golden works of beautiful dissemblances.

The Renaissance

I think what Walter Pater is trying to convey is that human experience is the base of all discovery and joy. He says that "every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end."
What I think he means by all this is that it is the instant of human connection, that point of interest that we may discern or uncover something, the moment of discovery, that we find so compelling, and not that the fruition of our philosophical meanderings or passionate observations are what drive human motivation to learn, but that the process of experience is what we most hope to attain and what we may gain the most pleasure from obtaining.
This advocate of "art for art's sake" goes on to say that "to burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." The point of life, he says, is to experience, and from out that experience we are formed as individual personalities who need do nothing more than experience and expand the realm of arts, poetry and philosophy.

Irrelevant

Here I sit and type,
With far greater things I could be doing.

I could invoke the muse,
A noble aspect worth pursuing.
Yet here I am, devoted to this screen.
An unworthy hobby if ever there has been.
Much rather would I save my time for games or play
But what else am I gonna do today?

The mouse was clicked with uncertain resolve, and his eyes scanned the screen for the immediate hint that his post had been published. He felt the old fierce pull of blood exacting the general human condition upon him. He knew his post was only as permanent as the internet, an outdated mode of communication by universal standards. It was only a matter of time before the lines crashed, the servers gave in to ruin and the internet as he knew it was little more than an archaic waste of plastic and metal making up the momentary structure that was the World Wide Web.

Literature Linkage

What I love about English, or more specifically, literature, is that all things are connected. I'll see or hear something and I swear it's "from something." "What's that from?" I'll ask, curious of my familiarity. Something from a book or a movie or a TV show that rings in my ears, begging I recognize where I first heard it. I will notice underlying, hidden levels of subtle humor by recognizing instances of parody that I would not have gotten had I not seen the work they are parodying. I can recall similar stories or ways to relate a story to another one in similar event, character or theme. I see displaced myth everywhere I look for it, it seems. Be it in cliche archetypes (Oh, look--another sit-com with an overweight idiot husband and an unusually attractive, well-meaning wife) or making connections between seemingly unrelated texts. Everything must be displaced myth, after all, as I can seem to make these connections on multiple levels or through multiple works. One of my favorite is the set of connections I wrote for a British Literate I extra credit essay comparing the villains of Othello and Paradise Lost, noting the likability of the main antagonists, their similar situations and motivation (military or rank-based ascension and denial), their weaknesses, traits, etc. The number of similarities were of no little amount, and served to remind me that all pieces of literature are inevitably linked, especially if one looks hard enough.

Anagogy, Nature and Human Thought

If the human mind is the circumference, that is, the thing in which all things are contained, as we begin to deal with the anagogical nature of phases, we see that human action may move from being imitative of nature to being the thing in which nature itself is contained. This works in the literal sense that the human mind is an organic product made by nature itself, and in that the possibilities of nature are contained within the collective human subconscious or within the expanse of human imagination. Like The Idea of Order at Key West, we see an ambigious transition from nature producing and containing the human mind, containing it within the confines of nature, and the mind attempting mimicry of said nature, to a newer phase, the phase of anagogy where nature's breadth is within the infinite of human mind, with nature being the lower entity, all nature becoming intrinsicly imitative of human thought. It would seem that once we examine things in the ultimate, in the broad general "underthought" of anagogical collective unconscious, that we may find the way of things, the natural idea of order, as in the poem, becomes displaced and flipped on its head, reversing the roles that nature and the human imagination play. We see, as we do in Wallace Stephen's poem, that nature goes from being human inspiration or the way of things to a concept percieved within the limits of human imaginative potential, a universal theme, a mere singularity of possibility within the infinite confines of our minds as poets.

Apocalyptic Imagination

Frye's conceptualization of apocalypse intrigued me. Apocalypse not as desolate Gothic aftermath of an absolute destruction of humanity (The Last Man, etc), but as a re-imagining of reality as perceived by man. Not a total destruction of the world as we know it, but literally a destruction of the world as we know it. We do not generally develop or coin positive connections with "apocalypse" and so Frye's unusual denotation of it startled me. To put such positivity into the word, and redefining it to suit his purpose (as he did with "poet," etc.) is a refreshing spin on a tired concept. He does not see the changing perception of man to his imagination as a damning thing by any means, though, only that the revamped concept of man's view of expanse of mind or of self requires a resetting by man, a destruction of the old to allow renewed fervor to be exploited by the newer concept.

Infinity and Nature

On page 119, as discussed in class today, Frye cites Hooker on man's apocalyptic ability, or mankind's capacities for infinite reality or being. The anagogic phase "imitates the total dream of man." Hooker claims that the desire man has for the infinite is a system inherent of nature. Man's dream of the infinite is both an imitation and a product of nature. Man sees the vastness of the cosmos and the intangible, untamable breadth of things. He seeks to attain such vastness, such unconquerable mass, that is found in the natural world, but Hooker argues that man tends to strive for intellectual and sensual perfection that seems to occur so mathematically perfect in the known avenues of nature, and in that man is born with such interests naturally instilled in them through commonly occuring thoughts, the product of nature. The observable universe is infinite in its solitude and something we wish to solve the complexeties of, but it is a natural event for humans to desire to do so. In our lust to be something further than is permitable for humanity, we are experiencing a natural sequence of nature: the passionate impulses for infinity and perfection.

I Wish I Was Don Quixote

I wish I was Don Quixote. I live in this bland world, but like the ambitious poet, I long for more than what I've seen around me. I want to live in the ideal world, the golden possibilities of the romantic or heroic life. Being more than my environment and more than simply the product of said environment. I don't want the low-mimetic, I long and desire and lust for the unstoppable torrent of excitement and adventure that tend to go hand-in-hand with such copious amount of beloved myth. I don't want this world of schools and jobs, though I find I fit within it rather well.
That is the difference between he and I. I settle. I accept my apparent fate, willing to go with the flow, brushed along the dregs of the river of life, while Don rejects the world, fights it. He cannot and does not accept his lot in life and forces himself into a golden world, even if it may be only within his perceived reality. He then, is perhaps a high-mimetic character in that he forces his will onto others. He is a high-mimetic character living a delusional romantic reality, born out of his rebellious nature against his bored life in the low-mimetic. One would think we would have a larger amount of people ill-content with their position in this world of the low-mimetic.

Literal Phase?

With the phases of symbols that Fry remarks on, he allows us to see the significance of each of the different types. I don't, however, understand how the phase of the literal is significant. It is itself an important phase in that it serves to categorize ways of immediate interpretation of the overall purpose of symbols to convey possible interpretation, and I understand that the literal phase serves as the denotative mirror of the descriptive phase's connotative nature. I don't, however understand the importance of understanding the literal phase in terms of literary criticism. What purpose does understanding the base, literal "letteral" value of a piece of literary work serve? I can't understand when a poet would desire his/her audience to take a poem at its literal value as forms and shapes. Other than taking poetry to some obscure level of post-modernist art form, I don't see a situation where interpreting the work through literal phase would accurately represent the poet's intentions.