The Rose and the Yew

While reading through "The Four Quartets" I noticed that Eliot mentions two things almost above all else. The first is the rose, and the second is the yew tree.

In class we discussed the rose as a symbol of love and romance, even carnal desire. It is the symbol of the immediacy of passion and love. Perhaps that is why Eliot links it with "Little Gidding" and his idea of fire. After all, do we not often say that we burn with passion or that love is kindled.

On the other end of the spectrum is the yew tree, a symbol of immortality, of death and rebirth. It is almost the perfect symbol for the entire book where the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. Everything comes around to a perfect circle.

The two symbols together form the perfect image, the immortality of love. No longer is it a fleeting feeling that burns hot and bright for a second before finally disappearing almost as if it were not there, but it burns eternally, purifying everything it touches and leaving it as if born anew.

In the end, I wonder if this poem is not Eliot's faith coming to the surface. It is said that Christ was crucified on a cross made of yew. That the yew symbolizes his mortality, perhaps the rose then is the undying love of Eliot's savior. He does not share it openly, perhaps, because he thinks that only those who can wade through the muck are truly deserving of the message.

Transmutation of the Soul

Since we have been talking about the transmutation of the soul in the last few classes and how that was connected to The Alchemist, I found myself returning to a previous class where we mentioned the soul. In major author's, we discussed the idea of the soul as a butterfly. Apparently many ancient civilizations thought that butterflies were either wandering souls or connected to the creation of new souls. In other words, everytime a butterfly came out of its cocoon, a new person was born somewhere.

It's interesting that ancients would use the butterfly as the symbol for the soul, as if they knew the connection between the transformation that the soul must go through in life and the transformation that a caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly.

I am imagining Plato explaining to one of his students the importance of knowledge and the transformation of the soul into something higher, an angel.

"We must remember how to fly," he tells his pupil, we'll call him Aristotle, who looks on in confusion at what the old man has just said.

"How can we learn to fly, Master?" Aristotle asks, still befuddled.

"Why, simply by remembering all the other things that we have forgotten. It is only after we remeber everything else that we can regrow our wings and take flight," replies the teacher, as if it were obivious.

"Will you teach me to fly, sir?" the boy ask eagerly.

Plato stares at his star student for a long moment as if he has asked the stupidest question. "It is not my place to teach you how to fly boy," he says finally. "You must learn on your own."

With these mysterious words, Plato leaves Aristotle to his own musings.

So we are all trying to transform ourselves into something better. Much like the young Aristotle, we crave the guidance of another to show us where to go. But the butterfly does not seek any help. It tranforms through its own power into something far greater than it was before. Where it was once chained to the earth, now it soars into the sky. It remembers how to fly and becomes the angel.

Alchemy in Literature

In Multicultural Literature, we have been reading a book entitled The Ghost of John Wayne. It is a somewhat confusing book filled with a bunch of short stories that almost seem to have no ending. It's so confusing, in fact, that I found myself flipping it over to read the back cover and see what others may have thought, or how someone could have described the book in a flattering light when I read the following:

"Ray Gonzalez is a literary alchemist, blending contemporary culture with ancient tradition..."

I was so shocked at finding the one word that we had almost beaten to death the day before, that I had to keep myself from laughing out loud in class. But now that I think about it maybe the stories are an alchemical experiment. All of them take place in modern settings but seem to have a mystical quality that supersedes everything else. As the author of the quote above says Gonzalez is blending the past and the present into something new and original. He has taken what many may consider to be a dead or dying genre and breathed new life into it, transforming stories that have been retold a thousand times into tales that even people of today can appreciate.

The Truman Show and Beckett

While we were reading Sara's blog today, I thought about this movie that I'd watched a couple of weeks ago called The Truman Show. The movie stars Jim Carrey and is about a man whose life is actually a TV show, even though he doesn't know it. Eventually he starts to realize that he's been trapped in this one town his entire life. Eventually he tries to escape and the producer tries to stop him at every turn until finally Carrey's character escapes from the world.

Anyways I was just thinking about how the main character's entire life is controlled by a god figure, much like the author in both Stranger than Fiction and Beckett's trilogy. Eventually Carrey, much like Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction.