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.

My Own Quirk

When we started discussing the sucking stones section of Beckett I thought about one of my own weird quirks that I use to have. I didn't really want to put this down but maybe nobody will read it and I'll be able to just slip this by. Anyway, here goes:

When I was about ten for some reason I decided that I would start counting the letters in words. Anytime I would hear an interesting word, I would have to dissect it. First seeing it in my mind and then separating the letters into even parts. Usually I would put two or three letters together in the hopes that the groups would come out even. If they did not, then the words were disregarded as uninteresting and "odd."

For example if I were to hear the word provision, I would see the word in my head and then break it apart so that I saw instead three different parts pro-vis-ion. I did this for about two years or three years, until I finally realized that I had become somewhat obsessed with breaking down almost each and every word in a conversation. I would literally break down every word longer than three letters to the point that conversations usually took a while and ended with the people I was trying to talk to walking away in frustration or staring at me with a strange look on their faces.

Anyway, I thought that I would share my own quirk with you guys and hopefully it was at least a little interesting.

A Thought On Beckett

I've been thinking for a couple of days about Beckett and been trying to make some sense of his writing which is simpler than Joyce's but that kind of goes without saying. What interests me the most is the idea of decay that we've been throwing around for a few days. Of course, obviously the first story actually deals with decay, but I think more than that, the writing itself almost seems to be decaying the further we go in the book. Where many would have created new paragraphs there are none. Where others would have used quotations, Beckett ignores them. It's as if the writing is slowly falling apart along with the characters in the story, as if it is somehow connected to the very characters that it tries to portray.

Anyway, just an idea that I had earlier and thought I'd put down.

3 Similarities

So I thought that I would write down a few of the similarities between "The Skin of Our Teeth" and Finnegans Wake.

1. The first I noticed was the continual references to the bible and Greek mythology, especially continual references to creation, Cain and Able, etc. There are also several references to the Muses as well as other myths. It seems that Wilder is, much like Joyce, trying to fit as much as possible into a few pages.

2. The second similarity that I noticed was that Wilder actually states what we have been discussing as part of the purpose of Finnegans Wake, that is the fact that in our dreams we are part of a different world from that when we are awake. In fact, one of the characters, Sabina I think, actually refers to this openly in the third Act.

3. The third similarity I would point out is the return to the beginning of the play much like Finnegans Wake returns to the beginning. The plays transition actually makes it obvious, literally restarting the play at the end but the concept is the same.