exploding mythologies

It looks like my Myth, Symbol, and Ritual class will be the most exciting, and most challenging, of my courses this year. The professor, Fred Clothey, was a student of the renowned mythologist Mircea Eliade, a gruff imposing man who founded Pitt's Comparative Religion department and immediately threatened to scare all the freshmen out. Apparently he retired last year, but the University was unable to find another teacher for this course, and I feel highly honored to learn from an authority in this field and not some gawky grad student. Asking us what a myth is, he shot down all our uncertain ideas, and though I recognize that having not been in school for seven years I really need to relearn how to frame my vocal arguments, I feel certain I will have all my assumptions about myth questioned and learn a great deal in this field which I perhaps have the most personal investment in.

As opposed to the six page final paper for my Critical Reading class, here I am expected to write three 7-10 page essays (the first due next month), each dealing with one of the topics, myth, symbol, and ritual. On top of that I must also write my own personal myth and an observation of a ritual outside of my everyday experience, all things that I currently push myself to do in my personal writing, but perhaps not with nearly the critical intent that the professor might hope us to bring. Thankfully, I am fascinated by these themes, and already have thousands of ideas for subject matter.

For the myth I will take one of the apocalypses with which I am familiar, possibly Revelations but more likely the Norse Ragnarok, which has exerted it's influence on my psyche since I first read it in fourth grade, interpreting its symbols as well as through a mythological theory (I'm not sure just whose yet), in order to show that though it describes an end of the world (in illo tempore), it is also a creation myth which paves the way for this present reality.

For the symbol I immediately decided on that of the Tower, perhaps the most pervasive symbol in my own mythology, and fitting because that's exactly the phase of life I'm in. The Tarot's blasted tower, the tower of Babel, the World Trade Centers, Tolkien's White Tower, Stephen King's Dark Tower, the current race for the world's largest skyscraper, and even Oakland's infamous gothic edifice, the Cathedral of Learning (or Tower of Ignorance), in which I have all my classes. Building not just as recreation of world, but as the human folly of trying to become the gods. I could probably tie in the internet as modern parallel of Babel.

For the ritual, I had already been planning on attending a Jewish Temple service with Sophie at some point soon, which could be interesting in comparison to my Catholic upbringing. But I also had the opportunity to participate in a Peyote ceremony in the spring on which I took extensive notes, and could potentially participate in another one specifically to examine for the class. What's interesting about that is the ceremony is removed from its traditional context (in the Yaqui shamanism Castaneda studied), and literally smuggled into the modern American world, an angle which might interest Clothey, who extensively studied religious diasporas in Southern India.

Regardless of what I actually end up writing about it is certainly already getting me thinking much more critically in these terms again, and making me reconsider the idea of doing a double major, in creative writing and comparative religion.

a matter of courses

I am now through most of my first week of school and I have to say how excited I am and thankful that I decided to apply to go this year, I think I would be going mad without it, having something else to push my brain and encourage me to grow beyond just my own day to day efforts. My schedule is only three days a week, and this feels almost like a vacation, having more free time to read and write, doing something more engaging than work. Of course I know that soon enough this will be filled with homework, but even that is still exciting and different. I had to write a one page paper last night for my critical reading class, and I spent most of yesterday afternoon working on it, perhaps going much deeper into a critical analysis of the reading than the teacher probably expects. I cant help it, I love to push my mind.

Some of the highlights so far: All my classes are in the Cathedral of Learning, a tower of gothic architecture that looms over the city and already featured as a significant landmark in my dreams. Wandering its halls and arched vestibules feels like I am in another century or country.

My history class, Magic Medicine and Science, does not appear to be as much geared towards looking at the medical arts, but at how these topics relate to the scientific revolution in the 17th century, but going as far back as the Greek philosophers through the Rennaisance alchemists. Mostly reading assignments, but we will have to write one paper, which the teacher said if we had our own ideas on... I already am thinking about the relation between alchemical and astrological world views, or between alchemy and the beginnings of psychology.

My intro to psychology class may be a large lecture in an icebox, but we are asked to participate in four hours of research studies, which should be highly fascinating and enlightening, and much further out of my everyday kinds of activities.

My critical reading class is in one of the Cathedral's nationality rooms, specifically, Yugolslavia, carved wooden walls and chandeliers. As opposed to the classic European literature most of the critical reading classes assign, our teacher is focusing on modern African American literature, which I admittedly know much less about. It will be curious to see how the class reacts to this, as they (and the teacher) are mostly white.

I have not yet had my last class, and the one I'm most curious about, Myth Symbol and Ritual, which looks at those themes in a modern context and is supposedly taught by a crazy alchemist professor. I am hoping to find someone intelligent and well read enough to perhaps become some sort of mentor, or at least a sounding board for some of my own ideas on the subject.

Perhaps my biggest hurdle so far is that I used the refund money from my loan to buy a new computer, one of the latest macbooks. I haven't had a reliable piece of hardware in years and I can't stop playing around with all its possibilities. Since I am a student, Apple has a deal where they also give you an ipod and a printer/scanner/copier for free. I am really glad to have this functional machine, but since its wi-fi capabilities are powerful enough to pick up an open network in my neighborhood I have to be really careful not to fall into my old habits of bumbling around the internet late into the night when I could otherwise be productive or asleep.

Either way it's all really exciting, and being back in school is already helping me to focus my mind better and start looking more closely at my future.

The Body of the Text

The Body of the Text
How unique is your sense of language?

100 most common words in the English language:
1 the
2 be
3 to
4 of
5 and
6 a
7 in
8 that
9 have
10 I
11 it
12 for
13 not
14 on
15 with
16 he
17 as
18 you
19 do
20 at
21 this
22 but
23 his
24 by
25 from
26 they
27 we
28 say
29 her
30 she
31 or
32 an
33 will
34 my
35 one
36 all
37 would
38 there
39 their
40 what
41 so
42 up
43 out
44 if
45 about
46 who
47 get
48 which
49 go
50 me
51 when
52 make
53 can
54 like
55 time
56 no
57 just
58 him
59 know
60 take
61 people
62 into
63 year
64 your
65 good
66 some
67 could
68 them
69 see
70 other
71 than
72 then
73 now
74 look
75 only
76 come
77 its
78 over
79 think
80 also
81 back
82 after
83 use
84 two
85 how
86 our
87 work
88 first
89 well
90 way
91 even
92 new
93 want
94 because
95 any
96 these
97 give
98 day
99 most
100 us

25 most common nouns
1 time
2 person
3 year
4 way
5 day
6 thing
7 man
8 world
9 life
10 hand
11 part
12 child
13 eye
14 woman
15 place
16 work
17 week
18 case
19 point
20 government
21 company
22 number
23 group
24 problem
25 fact

Verbs
1 be
2 have
3 do
4 say
5 get
6 make
7 go
8 know
9 take
10 see
11 come
12 think
13 look
14 want
15 give
16 use
17 find
18 tell
19 ask
20 work
21 seem
22 feel
23 try
24 leave
25 call

Adjectives
1 good
2 new
3 first
4 last
5 long
6 great
7 little
8 own
9 other
10 old
11 right
12 big
13 high
14 different
15 small
16 large
17 next
18 early
19 young
20 important
21 few
22 public
23 bad
24 same
25 able

As compiled by the Oxford English Corpus

emergent narratives

"Emergent narrative? Can there be such a thing as a narrative that emerges, by itself, from a seemingly random or chaotic structure or series of events? The way forms, fractal shapes and complex structures arise out of certain kinds of chaos. Are there “forms” — narrative cells I guess you could call them — that in sufficient quantity spontaneously give rise to what we call stories? If the existence of these things is possible then perhaps emotionally moving arcs, transformations and series of events could simply emerge by themselves given the right conditions — and could those conditions sometimes be man-made?"

from an article on interactive video games vs. narrative storytelling in David Byrne's blog (7.21.07)

My response is, of course, a resounding "Yes," having spent the last five years tracking out a narrative that has emerged from my own dreams. It is all in the power of the human mind to form connections.

open endings

I have been reading for a long time, pouring through stories at an unprecedented rate since I cold put sentences together, even being precocious enough to read the unabridged version of "Les Miserables" by 7th grade. But up till now, literature has always moved in one direction, from the front cover to the back, and I wrongfully assumed this was the only way to tell a story.

In the past several months I've discovered a near infinitude of story telling mechanisms, stumbling through several cases of what is called 'ergodic literature,' that is, texts that require a non-trivial effort to traverse the text, more than just the movement of eyes and pages from left to right, the reader performing the bare minimum necessary to interpret what they are reading. Several entries ago I mentioned Milorad Pavich's "Dictionary of the Khazars," a novel told through encyclopedia entries that one can read in any order, assembling the sense of a narrative for themselves. More recently I have fallen into what is perhaps the most important work of this type, Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch," the story of several expatriate intellectuals living in Paris, debating semantics until several disturbing events drive them apart. Beyond a beautiful sense of language and rhythm, Cortazar sets up fifty-six main chapters, which can be interspersed with over a hundred more following various cues in the text, and drastically changing the meaning of the work on a second reading. "Hopscotch" has been hailed by some as the originator of hypertext fiction, though it was written in the late 60s, and requires that one actually has to search through the book for the next chapter. After this I picked up Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves," which while not quite as impressive literaturely as "Hopscotch" was endlessly more ergodically fascinating. The 'story' is really a critical text about a film called the Navidson Record, which may or may not exist, written and annotated by a blind man and found by a young punk who adds his own twisted footnotes and storylines to the already winding text. The core narrative itself is about a house that is larger on the inside than on the outside, passages leading to evolving corridors, stairwells, labyrinths, and the text itself reflects the characters movements across tunnels and abysses. I couldn't put the book down, felt myself almost being consumed by it as quickly as I was consuming it, and when I finally finished it I was struck by the realization that the way I approach literature will never be the same.

For years now, I have been trying to sort through my dreams in order to write a novel out of them, and continually come upon the problem of how to organize them, how to present material so that it maintains it essentially dream-like quality. But all of this stood within what I thought were the bounds of conventional literature. Now however it is like I stepped through a door into a terrifyingly large space, full of possibility of what it means to tell a story. It reminds me of being a child, and climbing up to the top of a lighthouse, the closed stairwell spiraling with the familiarity of the Everyday, but on reaching the top you are confronted with the sky, vast, inviting, a sense of space suddenly reoriented from safety to terror, clutching the railing at the edge of the known while still wanting, desperately, to learn how to fly. I think about my work now, already at such an early state, and am struck by the sheer possibility of where it could go, how it could be conceived. Not quite the writer's fear of the blank page, but a fear of what could be put on it. Mallarme, in his poem "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," itself a masterwork of non-linearality, with the words spilling in literal waves over the pages, describes this feeling of facing the page as being "cast into the constant neutrality of the abyss." Anything is possible, but then the pen falls and something happens, but between those two just what is open to anything, fluctuations of mood and light and desire.

Not that it is necessary to tell stories in such roundabout ways, narrative abounds with ways of breaking that sense of constant time and meaning; flashbacks, delay. Both Pavich and Danielewski's latest ergodic works recieved horrible reviews (but as they are about respectively the tarot and the history of revolution, both themes that intrigue me, I will probably read them anyway, at least to seee how not to tell this kind of story). But there is still sometyhing fascinating about having to flip through a text, back and forth as cues take you. It is much more like how the mind works, not in some linear train of thought, but full of connections, associations, symbols that relate to each other in countless different ways, always suggesting much more than just what is on the neurons around them. Dreams may appear to be narrative in scope, but this is only a 'secondary revision,' the collecting of the images themselves being the key to their understanding, always pointing to each other and to something deeper, hidden beneath the linearality of events. Awhile back I had a dream in which I was teaching a school of witches a game about how history is created. I placed a chair in the middle of the room, then arranged progressively wider arcs of chairs around this center. One person in the front tells a story about an object on the chair, which like an endless game of telephone gets passed back through larger groups of people, each time getting further and further removed from the 'truth' of the event, everyone of course having their own idea of what truth is, until their are countless stories surrounding any one object or event. Somehow, this seems more true to me than any one history ascribed by one person (usually the victors), as we all have our own perspectives and an ability to decide what that means to us. Of course, I may have read too many choose-your-own-adventure books when I was a child.

Letters on the Night

Another night and no sleep, the black winged heat beating the skull into reticulated and endless queries. That trembling line between ritual and addiction, this humanity of angels, or the angelization of certain people at times to aid our desperate prayed for needing.

Reading Cortazar's "Hopscotch." Intriguing. After many fancy flips between the odd literated chapters, I suddenly realized I was reading, not just the ideas or narrative, but the flow of language as its own content. A thread of meter and assonance I had not picked out before, not completely in Cortazar's court, as I've been reversiting a faerie-tale I haven't wrote on in ages (Itelf a gnarled romp of synchronated cryptomorphoses). Honing gist to the mill of microphonal pages, I wanted to dream tonight, and write them out before work. Instead I get letters and rhyme schemes and for the third time should just go to bed.