We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.156-8)

I have not read The Tempest in quite a while and the last time that I saw it performed was by Shakespeare in the Parks in Ashland, Oregon several years ago. But after reading it this past weekend I remembered that it is one of my favorites, and that Prospero is one of my favorite Shakespeare characters, besides Horatio of course.

Since I feel that I do not have anything profound to say at this time I thought I would mention something I remembered while I was reading. By the time I was through Act 1 I thought of a past New Yorker article I read. The article was from an issue earlier this year and in it was a short blurb on Christopher Plummer and that fact that he has moved back into the Algonquin Hotel in New York. But anyways, the reason I bring up this random fact is that in the article it mentioned that Plummer will be playing Prospero in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario this year! What a coincidence, or is it? The odds are one in three, or so I am told!

I love Christopher Plummer (Captain Von Trapp! mmm hmmm)and was just struck by the coincidence that we would be reading this and a production would be happening this year. So nothing profound about The Tempest yet but that will come later as we get into discussion of it, I hope. For now just a sighting in the everyday world.

P.S. The pictures above are Plummer as Prospero, and just a picture I found that came up when I did an image search for The Tempest.

Big Fish, Ulysses and A Random Quote

When Dr. Sexson held up Big Fish on Monday I instantly thought of the adventures of Edward Bloom in the novel and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. They are both tales of journeys and coincidentally the protagonists have the same last name!?

I also thought about the structure of Big Fish, the novel not the movie. I love the movie, but I feel that Tim Burton missed one crucial element of Wallace’s novel. Throughout the tales that Bloom tells his son, each chapter is alternated with the same scene told slightly different ways. If I remember correctly the scene is when Bloom’s son is talking about his father, and how his father spoke of his own life and how he begins to tell it and then the reader is lead into another story.

Wallace uses the myth of the eternal return to write a tale about storytelling and the connection between father and son. Burton’s movie perfectly tells the stories but misses the theme of eternal recurrence at times. Try to read it if you have only seen the movie it is a completely different feeling and experience.

The random quote I though of as well is from Goethe. He writes, “Life is the childhood of our immortality.” I have seen that quote since I was little hanging on a small plaque in my Mother’s home, she loves Goethe, and thought it went rather well with this class. The idea that life is only the beginning and there is so much more to come.

Pulled into Beckett

So as I was reading Beckett I was pulled into his writing and especially his language. But then again weren’t we all. Especially after hearing Jon’s “testimony,” if we hadn’t started to read we were drawn in before even beginning.

Dr. Sexson wanted us to find five instances where Beckett speaks to us the reader through his writing. After getting farther into the reading I began to realize that there are many instances that Beckett reminds us that he is writing and this is a fictitious work. The ones I liked best are as follows. All of them are from Molloy because after getting through that work I decided to stop counting.

1. “Perhaps I had invented him, I mean found him ready made in my head. There is no doubt one sometimes meets with strangers who are not entire strangers, through their having played a part in certain cerebral reels.”

2. “I knew then about Mollory, without however knowing much about him. I shall say briefly what little I did know about him. I shall also draw attention, in my knowledge of Mollory, to the most striking lacunae.”

3. “But let us leave it at that, if you don’t mind, the party is big enough.”

4. “And in writing these lines I know in what danger I am….But I write them all the same, and with a firm hand weaving inexorably back and forth and devouring my page with the indifference of a shuttle.”

5. “And it would not surprise me if I deviated, in the pages to follow, from the true and exact succession of events.”

OK just two more because I love them!

“Stories, stories. I have not been able to tell them. I shall not be able to tell this one.”

“But it is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to literature.”

Beckett is continually pulling his audience in. While he tries to empty his works out his is pulling us into this emptiness. Writing “you” at times and even “Youdi,” while perhaps the old pronunciation of Yahweh, still hints at us the reader. Yet as a reader you cannot be helped to be surrounded by Beckett’s words, as long as we remember they are his.

The “Faith” of Moran

While reading through Molloy early on we encounter many of Beckett’s religious allusions. The most obvious evidence of these of course is in the names of those that give Moran his job orders, Gaber and Youdi, also know as Gabriel and Yahweh.

A passage that struck me appeared on page 132 in my edition. The passage is as follows:

“The voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard. From it is within me and exhorts me to continue to the end the faithful servant I have always been, of a cause that is not mine, and patiently fulfill in all its bitterness my calamitous part, as it was my will, when I had a will, that others should. And this with hatred in my heart, and scorn, of my master and his designs. Yes, it is rather an ambiguous voice and not always easy to follow, in its reasonings and decrees. But I follow it none the less, more or less, I follow it in this sense, that I know what it means, and in this sense, that I do what it tells me. And I do not think there are many voices of which as much may be said. And I feel I shall follow it from this day forth, no matter what it commands. And when it ceases, leaving me in doubt and darkness, I shall wait for it to come back, and do nothing, even though the whole world, through the channel of its innumerable authorities speaking with one accord, should enjoin upon me this and that, under pain of unspeakable punishments.”

I was struck by this passage in that it seems to be to me the perfect sentiment that so many feel about their faith. The first line is the best embodiment of this idea, “the voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard.” For many it is not the priest shouting from the pulpit but the voice within themselves that drives them on in what they do and their faith in something more.

Perhaps Moran is just slightly insane and the “voice” he is hearing are just the voices in his head, but I like to think of them as the voice that guides him in all he does. He needs no priest, rabbi or any other spiritual leader, he only needs Gods voice as his guide to feel as if what he is doing is right.

That to me is who Youdi is in the work. Gaber is Youdi’s messenger here on Earth but it is the voice of Youdi himself that Moran listens to and follows. That is what true faith is. Not the blind following of a prophet, but the holding on to your faith in something greater within your own self.
So whether Moran is just insane or not. I loved this passage in Molloy and felt it resonated with faith that Moran has in what he does and who he is doing it for. He is a true believer.

20 Minute Lifetime

After reading several blogs on my classmates personal experiences or ideas on the 20 minute lifetime I have come to the conclusion that many of the deal with dark subject matter.

I have not experienced the 20 minute lifetime myself, or at least I don’t remember it which means it probably passed me by without my notice, but in reading others blogs I noticed that most experiences surrounded a tragedy. Most notably, and the one I have heard most frequently was the car crash.

I have heard many people say “I saw my life flash before my eyes,” and what does that mean really and truly. Having never experienced anything like a car crash I was never sure, but after hearing about the 20 minute lifetime perhaps I can make a jab at it.

People often in traumatic situations experience a moment when all that is around them seems to go into a slow motion sequence, and a moment can seem like an eternity. They speak of seeing scenes from their life, or their entire life, flash before their eyes. Recalling whole scenes from their childhood and beyond. Perhaps even things they believe they didn’t even remember.

But this instance is a reliving of their lives all over again, and not a different life they are unfamiliar with, but their present and past. You never hear really of people coming out of an accident saying “I experienced another life” it is always “MY life flashed before my eyes.”

Perhaps this is an event that not really let’s us experience a completely new lifetime in a moment, but is reminding us of what there is left to be had in the life we are in. A kind of déjà vu that wakes us up to our reality. That may be why when people experience such an event their lives are changed forever. They are not waiting for life to begin because it already has. It is 20 minutes of OUR lifetime and not another that we will experience at a different time.

We may all be caught in the myth of the eternal return, experiencing our lives again and again and seeing them for the first time. But it is the realization of the time and life we are in that is important to what we make of our lives to come.

20 Minute Lifetime in Four Quartets

"Home is where on starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter."

East Coker Section V (31)

Allusions of Eliot

So I read the Four Quartets this past weekend and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Almost every corner is turned down indicating passages and sections I loved.

One of the references that was easy for me to spot was in Little Gidding Section IV, and the reference to Hercules and Deianira. I only know this because it was the story from Ovid I had to present in Classical Lit. with Dr. Sexson. Eliot’s two stanzas summed up an entire tale that Ovid wrote in many more. Once again Ovid is emerging in this class as a reference and allusion for many to use.

The story is about the love of one person for another, a love that is all consuming. A fire that consumes and redeems us. Eliot recognizes that love is a torment, but it is also the thing that saves us in the end. Hercules is consumed in a “pyre”, both his shirt and of his own making, and is redeemed in his metamorphosis into a constellation. As Eliot writes, “The only hope, or else despair/Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-/To be redeemed from fire by fire” (57).

One of my other favorite references that Eliot made was to the children in the trees. I have not been able to look more into this idea but I plan to. The lines that include this idea are as follows:

“Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,/Hidden excitedly, containing laughter” (15).

“Sudden in a shaft of sunlight/ Even while the dust moves/There rises the hidden laughter/Of children in the foliage…” (20).

“The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple-tree/Not-known, because not looked for/But heard, half-heard, in the stillness/Between two waves of the sea” (59).

I am not sure why these passages strike me so, but they stay with me even after I have finished reading. There are also so many more passages, but I will not fill this blog with lines I love, or at least try not to!