Regents Professor

My Once Upon A Time......

So you want to know about the most interesting part of my weekend? Well surprisingly enough it wasn't the football game; it wasn't tailgating; and it wasn't going to the Testicle Festival at the Fairgrounds. The most amazing part of my weekend happened in my room on a lazy Sunday afternoon with my roommate. We were just sitting around watching "Once Upon A Time" and BSing the afternoon away. All of a sudden, an image flashed into my mind! It was so vivid that I had no choice but to share every last detail with Siobhan. Wait, you want to hear about this amazing image too? Alright if you insist. It looked a little something like this....

"Once upon a time, a harried mother was trying to entertain her two young children on a road trip across Montana. This mother had already been in the car with her children for hours and was running out of patience until finally she resorted to telling stories to try and stop the bickering. She started her story by telling the two unruly children that if they listened quietly, they could have a treat in the next town. The mother then launched into her story with....

   "Once upon a time, there was a Momma platypus with many many children living in a far away land called New Zealand. Now this Momma platypus worked hard to make her baby platypus happy. She cooked, cleaned their platypus house, and kept away the scary Dingoes. But a day eventually came when the evil Dingoes tricked her and kidnapped one of her babies. Now Momma platypus didn't know what to do. She was so scared for her poor little baby. But then she remembered hearing about these two kids in Montana who had magic powers that let them be able to defeat evil Dingoes. So Momma Platypus sent a message in a bottle to the two children. Now these children's names were Jennifer and J.E. Do these names sound familiar to you??

  "Those are our names!!!"

  "That's right they are. Now Jennifer and J.E. found Momma Platypus' note down at the creek one afternoon. As soon as they found the note, they both raced to their Big Shed to get into their Supersonic Helicopter. They flew across the Pacific Ocean, then the Indian Ocean, and then across Australia. Finally after a long long journey, the two heroes arrived at Momma Platypus' house. Our hero and heroine quickly came up with a way to save the baby and keep the Evil Dingoes away for forever! They would make a trench that the Dingoes wouldn't be able to cross, EVER. But how would they rescue the baby first? Luckily, Jennifer had remembered to pack their super-sonic Bazooka guns that shot hot dogs as far as the eye could see. Both J.E. and Jennifer grabbed their guns and ran towards the Dingoes Fortress of Evil. Just as our heroes were about to be attacked, they fired the hot dogs away from themselves and the Platypus family. And as everyone knows as soon as a Dingo sees a hot dog, they have to chase it and eat it one tiny tiny tiny bite at a time. While the Dingoes were slowly eating their hot dogs, Jennifer ran inside the fortress to get Momma's baby. 

While Jennifer was rescuing the baby, J.E. went and go their shrunken trencher and made it normal sized again. Once it was normal sized, he started to build a trench around Momma Platypus' house. This trench would be deep enough that the evil Dingoes would never be able to cross it. Finally the trench was done and all of the babies were back safe and sound with Momma Platypus. As soon as their job was done, Jennifer and J.E. jumped back into their amazing helicopter to fly home. They flew as fast as they could towards home as they couldn't be late for supper. Their mom's one rule was that saving the world couldn't interfere with supper time. The children arrived at home just as their mom started calling them into dinner. The end!" 

   Just as the mother said the end, the car came into view of the next town. But now instead of excitement about getting candy, the entranced children begged to keep going so they could hear another story. They wanted to know about the other Quests of Jennifer and J.E."

Siobhan was amazed at this story. After finishing telling my tale, she got up, turned off "Once Upon A Time", and asked to hear the next story in the Quests of Jennifer and J.E. 

Best/Worst Part of the Arabian Nights

    Reading through the Arabian Nights this evening, I have found the problem with them. Actually it isn't really a problem but an annoyance for the impatient readers, such as myself. Personally, I want to finish a story before moving on to the next one. I am finding it so very aggravating to have to wait page upon page to find out why someone behaved as they did or how the rest of the story ended up.I can see why this book has made such an impact on people for centuries. It is so addicting!
   Reading through these stories, I can see the appeal of them not only in the literary form but also the oral form. These are the stories that allow dreams to come to life. I will be the first to admit that reading is great but listening allows the mind to engage even more fully with a story. Without having the task of visually seeing the words, the mind can create a visual within the mind. Throughout our meetings, Prof. S. has talked about noticing us being so enchanted with a story that a classmate is telling that nothing could have taken our attention away. That is how I imagine that it would be hearing The Arabian Nights told as oral stories. We received a little exposure to this idea on Tuesday as Prof. S. read parts of the beginning of this collection of stories. But it wasn't the full effect of hearing all of them read aloud in a conducive atmosphere. Think back over the stories that you have loved the most so far and imagine hearing them being spoken to you from some invisible narrator. Doesn't it draw up images so vivid and profound that you don't want to open your eyes ever again? It does for me. As I am typing this, my eyes are closed imagining the three sisters and their imprisoned male captives with black slaves standing around waiting and craving the opportunity to behead the males of the group. I don't know how the story ends as it has diverted off into the stories of the men but my imagination craves the end as much as my more logical side craves a conclusion. Thus in one short sitting of The Arabian Nights I have found the most annoying and the most rewarding aspect of the story, the structure of a story within a story, that has made it beloved for centuries. 
    Thinking of these stories in this manner leads me back to a quote that I highlighted from the book that Prof. S gave me on Tuesday. He lent me his copy of Stranger Magic which I fell so in love with that I had to go get my own copy. This way I could make notes and highlight to my heart's content. Now I haven't made it past the introduction yet as my time is taken up with more trivial things such as sleep and working on homework for other classes. But in the reading that I have done so far this quote struck a cord in me. "I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else." Very few things in the world are more insightful than this philosophy towards reading literature. Everyone should always make a text mean more than what the author intended. If a person doesn't try to create more meaning or else a different meaning of a text, then the time spent reading it was wasted. If a person just want to believe what someone before them has said then they are wasting the precious gift of having the freedom and luxury of knowing how to read and imagine. 

9/18/2012 Important Class Info

Normally, I post my notes more consistently but this class has a completely different feel about it than previous Sexson classes that I have enjoyed. However, there were some key points of information that will be helpful for everyone in the class.


Groups for Little, Big

1. Ashley, Charlie, Logan
2. Hannah & Jenny
3. Hunter & Matt
4. Abby & Derek
5. Lana & Jennifer
6. Sydney & Sarah

Our assignment for the next week is to create our own Frametales. We were all assigned specific levels so hopefully you know what Prof. S. gave you! We are also supposed to diagram the levels of the Arabian Nights. 

Books mentioned by Prof. S. during class

• Stranger Magic by Marina Warner
• Lost in the FunHouse by John Barth

We discussed the frame of the Arabian Nights during class and read through the first night as well as went over the class schedule for the semester. The schedule is attached at the top of my blog if you need a digital copy of it. 

Consciously Dreaming

    Since starting this class, I have looked for as many examples of stories within stories as I could possibly find. Randomly throughout my day, I find examples that I swear I will remember so I can blog about them later but rarely do I remember.

    I have found one more example in popular television that I have remembered...well actually it really isn't that popular of a show but I enjoy it. Once Upon a Time is a show that incorporates all of the fairy tales that we grew up hearing into present day America.  But thinking about this show made me think about the biggest story within a story that we all know, which is our lives. Each one of our lives is our story but it is embedded and immersed in so many other stories. It is truly impossible to separate out the stories of reality. Relating the themes of classes is what helps me to find the purpose of literature courses. (Must be my business side kicking in)
    This same phenomenon can be found in Sharazad's story. In order for it to have the gained the popularity and status it now has, the author(s) must have created the stories within a reality. Sharazad's reality. I'm not all the way through the Arabian Nights but already I can tell that reality is intertwined with the mystical. So much so that it is impossible to tell what is real and what isn't. The themes of greed, love, betrayal, loyalty, and every possible human emotion can be seen in the stories that Sharazad spins for her king. The mystical and the believe aspects of the story intertwine so much that everything becomes believable. I started asking myself, why couldn't a woman turn into a goat. This complicated relationship causes the lines to blur between reality and fiction.
    Thinking of the blurring of reality and fiction reminds me of various dreams that I have had lately. Last Wednesday night, I had the most horrible and wonderful dream of my life. It was vivid, realistic, and impossible. The dichotomy of horrible and wonderful is what creates the dichotomy of the realistic and the impossible. Or is it vice versa? Either way, the dream was so heart-wrenching that when I woke, my pillow was soaked through with tears. These tears were of sorrow and of joy. The particulars of the dream aren't the point this discussion. The point that is vital is that even as I was dreaming, I knew I was dreaming. At one point, I knew I was dreaming as I floated in the air and looked down upon myself laying in a hospital bed asleep in a coma. I was conscious of my dreaming state as I lay in my bed in my house in Bozeman as well as my hospital bed. Who knows how many more layers of consciousness that I don't remember or am not able to be aware of. This is the type of feeling that television, movies, and literature seek to emulate. Nestings  within these types of entertainment and communication are our way of consciously seeking the amazing feeling of knowing multiple levels of the unconscious at one point in time. Normally we can reach this point only through dreams and very rarely do we remember it. We may remember the feeling for a brief time period but rarely does it last long or are we able to recall it with clarity. It is almost like a gift from our subconscious when we are allowed to remember the moments of our life when we transcend to more than one level of our being.
   Transcending to multiple level of our being reminds me of tales told in various mythologies. The specific imagery that pops into my mind when I try to imagine the subconscious in a visual manner stems from Egyptian myths that have been passed down. This image is of the Duat, or the land of the gods and of the dead. Looking through the Internet, I haven't found a picture of the Duat that resembles the one that I have formed in my mind. I see the Duat as a layer below the level that we inhabit. This lower level looks similar to the one we live in except that more can be seen. Gods, mythology, fiction, and so much more can exist at this level that is directly below our reality. The really interesting thing about the Duat is that there is multiple levels of it. I haven't been able to imagine the levels that are below the one that I just described but I believe they are there. This is how I imagine our subconscious to be. Levels upon levels that blur the boundaries of reality and fiction, mythos and logos, and the subconscious and conscious states of our beings and souls.

Exploring the innocence of children

    Today's assignment is to talk about what we learned from our class discussion yesterday with Professor Lynda Sexson. First off, I would like to say that she is an amazing speaker and definitely knows here stuff about Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. In this one class period, we covered so many topics that there is no way that I can even begin to explore them all in one blog. However, we didn't expressly talk about the subject that captured my interest was the subject of children and their roles in fictional works.

    Before reading Through the Looking Glass for the first time this week, all I knew of Alice was what I saw from the Disney movie. Beyond the actual book, I knew nothing of Lewis Carroll. or Charles Dodgeson.    The part of Charles' life that interested me was his apparent fascination with children specifically as characters in his novels. When thinking about this I started to wonder, why are children used so often as mirrors, symbols of terror, or of hope respectively? Why is that often in horror movies, are children used to inspire such fear? And going even further on in this vein of thought, why does the idea of children being evil create such fear in the ones that I have been watching? In the past few weeks, I have been watching a lot of TV, especially the show Supernatural. Here is a clip to illustrate how the horror increases when the evil creatures are children. 

    This clip shows a compilation of children in various shows that are currently popular or else shows that have been popular in the last decade. The music is pretty creepy but it definitely conveys the point I am trying to make here. Everything seems much creepier when children are involved! But on the flip side, when put into stories that have a hopeful or happy bent, children supercharge whatever emotion is trying to be conveyed. 
    In my opinion the scary factor rises because children are like mirrors in the fact that they are able to bridge  the gap between Wonderland and reality. Their "bridginess" comes from their ability to still believe in the supernatural and the impossible. Creepy children are especially horrible because in them we see not only them but ourselves when we were younger. 
   The next thing that bears scrutiny is the innocence that children possess.The key here is innocence that has not been tainted by a lifetime of hearing that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and Harry Potter aren't real. No story, myth, or fairy tale can exist without the existence of innocence, both within the story and in the people who either are listening to the story, telling the story or reading the story. Innocence has untold power and potential. The power and potential of Through the Looking Glass is magnificent. Alice's power comes from her ability to readily accept the strange and unusual. She finds it odd that flowers talk, that animals can converse, and that she is able to become a queen but she doesn't let it stop her from accepting this as her new reality. I think that this is what Carroll found so great about working with and studying children. It isn't just fictional children that have this ability but normal human children as well. So instead of finding Carroll to be creepy maybe we should look at him for inspiration of where to look to find the true possibilities for our reality. 
    If we look around us, we will find that the presence of innocence is everywhere. It can be found in books, poems, and even within literature majors. We were called to this area of study because we look for the innocence and how to create it ourselves. None of us choose to be literature majors just because we like to read, even though that does add into it. The real reason that people chose to be Lit majors is because the idea of being able to figure out how to understand innocence. We want to capture it and use it to help us understand how the world works. 

Ouroboros and its role in the collective unconscious

Ouroboros is the image that came to mind when we were speaking about C.J. Jung's Trapdoor Dream. During last semester, research and curiosity led me to this unique idea as well as to Jung's dream and the collective unconscious. The idea that intrigued me the most about the collective unconscious and ouroboros is that they connect everything in the world. The collective unconscious is somewhat self-explanatory in its name while ouroboros basically symbolizes the never ending cycle. Now there is much more to these ideas and images respectively, however, the definitions just given work on a more superficial level. Ouroboros again connected to our last class discussion on the topic of alchemy. Ouroboros is the never-ending cycle. It means "one is the all".

As I am sure all of us have been exposed to many different mythologies over our lifetime, we have all had some exposure to the symbol of Ouroboros, even if we did not realize it at the time. Over the centuries, parts, if not all, of the symbolic representations of Ouroboros have shown up in almost all cultures. With research, parts of this long-living idea can be seen in the Chinese Yin-Yang, in Greek mythology, Aztec gods, throughout the Middle Ages, and even in Egyptian mythology. The prevailing image is an archetype that through the world's collective unconscious has been used to symbolize the importance of the life's many cycles.

Above is the picture that first showed the symbol of Ouroboros. This is from the Enigmatic Book of the Netherland, which originated from Egyptian lore. This book tells the story of the birth of the Sun God, Ra, and Orisis. The book was broken into three pieces and each piece is found in or on the tomb of a different Pharaoh of Egypt.

In Greek mythology, the symbol of Ouroboros is present but the idea of it can be found in the story of Demeter and Persephone. The mother and daughter signify the never ending cycle of nature and the world.

Ouroboros appears as Jörmungandr in Norse mythology. From this story, a serpent is able to grow large enough to surround the world until it is finally able to eat its own tail. If it ever lets go, the world as we know it will end.

As you can see, Ouroboros' appearance throughout the entire world's various mythologies connects deeply with the idea of the collective unconscious. Without the idea of the collective unconscious, it is hard to explain the reasoning as to why a single idea could spread as widely and as closely linked throughout the world's cultures. Not only does it connect the mythologies of the world but it also connects to nestings and the them of this class. Never-ending cycles come in many forms. Chinese boxes, spiraling circles, stories within stories, and many many more images that we can all come up with given the time and inspiration.

8/30 Notes

Klein Bottles

• Klein Bottles
• Logan got the idea
• bottom=top
• Mobius Strip
• Ampersand



Ampersand

• reminded Ashley of Pale Fire's poem at the beginning
• 
  
• Howard Nemerov
• "The interpretation of a dream is the next room of the dream"
• Collective Unconscious
• C.J. Yung
• Trapdoor Dream
• Retort
• strange jars
• alchemist
• metaphors of transformation
• eliminating impurities
• Archetypes
• "We are their parents & originals"
• Vice Gambattista
• history seen mythologically
• 4 Stages
• Gods --> Hierogliphics
• Heroes --> Poetry
• Humans --> Commerce Language
• Subhuman --> Chaos
• Chaos is the closest to the gods
• James Joyce last novel is based on this cycle
• Heiro=sacred
• Assignments
• Read Midsummer Night's Dream Act 2
• Introduction to The Arabian Nights Volume 1
• Start following each other's blogs

Mobius Strip