what if.

1. Who reflects on the past the most? The least?

A very long time ago, I stumbled upon a very cheesy, rather cliché John Greenleaf Whittier quote that read, "Of all the words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been." It's nothing too deep, well worded, beautifully phrased or anything, but as I think back to it now...it's true. As humans, we constantly play this "What If" game with ourselves. We run through scenarios over and over and over, "What if I'd done this," "What if I'd said that," only to snap back to reality to realize that there is absolutely nothing we can do about it now. The feeling of helplessness that comes with such a realization can suffocate anyone. But the "What If" game is never over. For Quentin, the Sound and the Fury character most influenced by the past, this oppressive inability to change and be the past leads to his death. "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death." Benjy's chapter makes many references to the past, but these are not so much conscious memories as past experiences recollected because of present happenings. His chapter does not give the reader an intellectualized portrait of the Compson family's past. Jason's reflections, on the other hand, are not much more than skewed justifications for his despicable actions. The past drives him to impotent fury, but the past drives Quentin to death. In his chapter, his obsession with the past, specifically Caddy, is evident in the constant intermingling of present experiences with foregone memories. He cannot escape the memories, much like no member of the Compson family can escape the vicious cycle in which they spin. Quentin views time as his mortal enemy, and as much as he "What Ifs" his past experiences regarding Caddy, he cannot help but envy the way that the past just rests, frozen in time. The "petty pace" for Quentin is a labor, a painful, reluctant move forward and, he recognizes, backwards at the same time. Quentin's focus on yesterday leads him to a dark, still death at the bottom of a river. An untimely death – one last slap in the face to his most trying adversary.
Dilsey, on the other hand, is, in a fairly literal sense, out of the loop. She is the heart and soul of the Compson household, but she has not become trapped in the vicious cycle that consumes the family members for whom she works. Her strength stems from the fact that she does not focus on the past. Her eyes face forward. In her chapter, she claims to have seen the end – the future of the family. Quentin could only focus on the past. Faulkner could not end The Sound and the Fury with a memory. He had to illustrate the future of the Compsons, not reiterate the past. Dilsey, old and withered, stands a glorious pillar of strength, resistance to foolish "What If" games, and bravery in the face of time. The reader ends the book not running backwards but taking small, deliberate steps forward – creeping in that petty pace towards the inevitable extinguishing of the candle.

dalton ames and the quentins.

First of all...my new goal in life is to form a band called Dalton Ames and the Quentins. I think that would just be great.
Secondly, I have this blog post to write.

Benjy's chapter was, yes, difficult to read. He jumps around, his mind wanders, italics, non-italics, does it mean anything, thank god for hypertext...etcetera. But we're okay with it. We accept it and struggle through it without getting pissed off. Why? Because we know he is mentally retarded. It's almost like real life. You don't get frustrated when you can't understand a mentally retarded person. You feel bad. You're sympathetic. You put on your most gentle voice, a big smile, and dive into this dark communicative sea that you know you can't navigate, but you'll try it anyway because you're a bad person if you don't. So when we read it, we recognize that Benjy's chapter is difficult but, in a strange way, we forgive the difficulty as though we were trying to speak with Benjy himself.
Quentin, on the other hand, frustrated, flustered, and flabbergasted the crap out of me. I was genuinely upset trying to get through that beast of a chapter. Was it well written? Yes. Did it rattle my soul? Yes. Did it make me think harder than I've had to think in a while? Yes. Did it piss me off? You know it. Quentin is no Benjy. He's enrolled in Harvard. We all assume that punctuation remains a part of the Ivy League curriculum, but for the most part, Quentin disregards it. The whole chapter is full of this strange and confusing juxtaposition of well-phrased, highly intellectual passages with completely unconventional, borderline incomprehensible portions.
I understand completely why Faulkner wrote the chapter the way he did. I felt the effect he intended it to have, this kind of rushing, uninhibited, beautiful stew of thought, emotion, memory, etcetera. I get it. That doesn't make it any less frustrating to read. We don't pity Quentin, specifically his mental condition, the way we pity Benjy. Subsequently, we do not forgive his chapter for being difficult to read. Without the "oh-he-can't-help-it" factor of Benjy's portion, Quentin's tale is completely frustrating. Because we know he can help it. But really, the fact that he can help it is what makes the chapter powerful. When a Harvard student's thoughts and memories are comparable in confusosity (not a word, I'm well aware) to those of someone like Benjy...red flag. Now we have to not only get through the labyrinthetic (again...not a word, sorry) prose, but also figure out why Quentin's chapter is written this way. Faulkner is making a point by enrolling Quentin at Harvard, the most prestigious college in American history. Benjy is an idiot, Quentin is not, but their chapters are in many ways equally jumbled. Faulkner gives us Benjy's "why," but he leaves Quentin's lost in the labyrinth. And Faulkner, that scoundrel, expects me to figure the whole thing out?
The nerve.

But for real...
Quentin's chapter kicks some literary backside.

5 - foggy rivers, blurry lines.

"I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness found him out early, and had taken vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core." Heart of Darkness

"Civilized" man, in a sense, is hollow. We lack, or like to think we lack, that dangerous, beautiful, primal core that catalyzed humans to the top of nature's chain. After our dominance was established, we, as a race, became more complacent, tame, empty. "Uncivilized" man, in a sense, is also hollow. We lack the grace of manners, prudence, subtlety. Survival remains the focus of day to day life. Both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now examine the blurring of the already hazy line between "civilized" and "uncivilized." What happens to civility in an inhospitable climate or culture like Vietnam or Africa in the choke hold of imperialism? What happens to the human soul in the heart of darkness?
In Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, "civilized" man's transition is stark. In the film, the All-American boys become prisoners of fear whose only sense of freedom is the right, the encouragement, to kill that which is threatening. The white men in Heart of Darkness follow a similar path – imprisoned by fear, liberated through superficial conquer. In both stories, the irony lies in the fact that the "civilized" people are regressed by the very culture they are there to "civilize." The ease with which the soldiers in Apocalypse Now and the white men in Heart of Darkness are transformed reveals the hollowness of civilization. They are almost like blank canvases – beings defined solely by what takes hold of them. They have no solid sense of who they are. They are – we are – innately empty.
Why then is Kurtz so dangerous? If all civilization imposed upon these "savage" lands falters, what makes Kurtz so different from everyone else? He, in both film and novella, is imprisoned not by fear like the others but by power. Kurtz did not make a clean shift from "civilized" to "uncivilized". He straddled the line, compounded the hollowness of both groups within himself. He disregarded the manners of his former life while keeping them at the same time. He immersed himself in the primitive brutality of the jungle while staying above it at the same time. These two hollows within his soul sum to more than emptiness. They become darkness.
Kurtz is accused in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now of insanity, but in actuality, he is threatening because he had more sense under his circumstances than everyone else. He did not succumb to fear and abandon his celebrated past. He took advantage of his setting and played deity because he was cognizant enough to know that he could. While the rest of the army or Company was cowering away from the darkness, Kurtz, in a strange show of bravery, became a part of it. How ironic that in the midst of war, fear, not valor, is the only acceptable reaction.
Hollow is not dangerous. Emptiness, to some degree, is what we are all used to, "civilized" and "uncivilized." Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now illustrate the panic caused by even a single man who has begun to make a powerful statement out of his blank canvas and the confusion as to what such an action makes a him – uncivilized for drowning himself in primitive, pagan idolatry, or more civilized than any for his ability to see beyond the fog of fear? The line is blurred, and it is this uncertainty, like the hidden nightmares beyond the fog on the river, that shakes the empty souls of men.

4 - creation, degeneration, and back again.

If these stories are "art," what makes them a creative activity both for the reader and the writer? Choose a story and discuss its creative aspects and what is available for interpretation.

My mom's company used to give out these Norman Rockwell calendars every year, each month with a different painting. The beginning of Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" reminded me of one of those paintings. Rockwell is known for his realistic, detailed, almost humorous approach to art – his pieces appear to be almost photographic snapshots into the lives of everyday people. O'Connor creates a similar atmosphere with her characters and setting. We can really see Julian, the surly only son, ungratefully handsome and intelligent, shirt wrinkled to spite his mother, eyes cast downward, walking down the street with his pleasantly plump, naively blue-eyed and childish mother, dressed like a proper Southern lady but wearing a ridiculous hat. These images do not require great stretches of the imagination, much like Rockwell's paintings don't really leave much room for interpretation.
However, as O'Connor's story progresses, the detailed strokes become more hurried, the photographic clarity loses focus, the images become less quaint. O'Connor obviously likes to create realistic characters that surely stem from her own life observations, but she also likes to place them in unusual, tense situations that reveal more about them than who they are "in the tenor of their daily lives". Much in the same way that Shakespeare contracted the story of Othello onto the island of Cyprus, O'Connor intensifies the relationship between Julian and his mother by cramming them onto the bus, providing no outlet, only still air for breeding tension. O'Connor shows her true range as an artist by subtly transforming a Rockwell into a Renoir or Monet – the life, the realism, is still evident, but as the lines and strokes become less defined (as, ironically, their relationship becomes more so), so does the meaning, allowing the readers interpret more for themselves.
The end of "Everything That Rises Must Converge," however, is when O'Connor really relinquishes her brush to the readers. When Julian's mother gets clocked by the black woman, that single moment of violence catalyzes the story from impressionism to abstraction – the endearing details surrounding Julian and his mother are no longer relevant. Mother and son have been stripped to "that which they are essentially." At the end of the story, O'Connor invites readers to flesh out the primitive images of human nature that she has created into something more realistic, but the pictures we paint will not mirror those with which O'Connor began the story. However, it was still important for us to begin with her Rockwell-esque images. If we'd been handed a Jackson Pollock...well crap. We would only really be able to respond to splatters with splatters, and then we would have just gotten stuck in the difficulties we encountered trying to glean meaning from images that were so far from what we view as "real life." But by beginning in such a straightforward manner and then degenerating her own realisms into abstraction, O'Connor makes it far less difficult for us to reconstruct these raw images into something more real and personal to us – to really become the artists of our own interpretation.

3 - stop. drop. and roll.

So I have this mental picture of Iago. A tall, lanky white guy with dark, greasy hair. His hands are pasty and frail with fingernails that are just slightly to long for a man. From far away he just looks like a punk, the kind of guy that, if you saw him on the street, you would cross to the other side, but up close you can see the fire in his eyes.
Literally, fire.
When I think of a pyromaniac, I think of someone who sets fire to other things, but in the case of Iago, he has first set fire to himself.
Iago, at some point, was a decent human being. When it came to Othello at least, we know that Iago had issues with him, namely that he suspected him of sleeping with Emilia, but because he was so caught up in this idea of becoming his lieutenant, Iago continued to serve Othello dutifully, dazzled by the glorious promises that war, that Othello, held for him – the same way a man goes to church under the impression that he'll end up with a nice two-bedroom in the clouds someday.
So Iago swept all his problems with Othello under the rug, thinking that it would all be worth it when he was appointed lieutenant. The thing about religious people is that religion is not just one facet of their lives. Religion is their life. So when Iago didn't get the job, he didn't just shrug and head for the job classifieds. Othello choosing someone else was like the churchgoer discovering that Heaven doesn't even exist. It was enough to cause Iago to throw not only his admiration for Othello to the dogs, but everything else as well. Just like a teenage girl might tearfully burn all tangible remembrances of a foregone sweetheart, Iago flung himself into a fire formed from a homemade spark and plenty of timber that even the heavy carpet couldn't smother.
The most dangerous property of fire is that it spreads. If it didn't, we wouldn't get tickets for parking in front of those ridiculous yellow things or have any use for Smokey the Bear. When Iago's soul went up in flames, he recognized that everyone else around him was still under the illusion that had once blinded him. He saw that he was now on a different plane from his former equals, like a puppeteer to his puppets. He saw the perfect opportunity to play an evil, wicked, brilliant game. What is so beautiful about the way Iago destroys the lives of the people around him is how natural it is. Although he is the author of a multifaceted tragedy, he really didn't have to do much. When his own morals caught fire, it was only a matter of time before the fire spread to someone else, and then another, and another. Suddenly Iago finds himself in an enclosed incineration pit (Cyprus) that is suffocating everyone but him. But because everyone's religion is Iago's game, and Iago's game is everyone's impossibility (even his wife refuses to believe that anyone could concoct a plan so cruel), no one even thinks to stop, drop, and roll until it's far too late. By manipulating the devotion, love, virtue, and good of other people into a masterfully malignant web of malice with uncanny ease, Iago has made the transition from worshiper to god and becomes the victor of his own game.

1 - me, as told by other people.

"...we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. ... We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. ... that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail." - john green, looking for alaska

"Smile, like you've got nothing to prove, no matter what you might do, there's always someone out there cooler than you. I know it's hard to believe, but there are people you meet – they're into something that is too big to be expressed through their clothes. And they'll put up with all the poses you throw, and you won't even know. ... Now that I've got the disease, in a way I'm relieved, 'cause I don't have to stress about it like you do. I might just get up and dance or buy some acid-washed pants. When you don't care then you've got nothing to lose. And I won't hesitate, 'cause every moment life is slipping away. It's ok. Make me feel tiny if it makes you feel tall, but there's always someone cooler than you." - ben folds, "there's always someone cooler than you"

"And the tree was happy." - shel silverstein, the giving tree

2 - unhatched.

When I asked my friends who took World Lit last year what Oedipus Rex was "about," this was the consensual reponse:
"This guy who has sex with his mom."
So I began reading the play thinking, "How can I possibly relate to this? First off, I'm not a man. I'm not a king (but close). I'm definitely not familiar with incest...this play will have nothing to do with me."
But as my eyes made their way over the final words of the final scene, I realized –
Oedipus Rex has everything to do with me.

I consider myself lucky. I like to think that I have a wonderful life and, if I keep going the way I'm going, that it will stay wonderful forever. Then I read this story about Oedipus, a magnanimous man who has used intelligence and a natural sense of nobility to work his way to the top, a lucky guy, who, in one bad day, has everything come crashing down around him.
The moral of Oedipus Rex is not, "If you sleep with your mother, bad things will happen to you." What it tells us is that nothing is guaranteed. We can work hard and be nice to the neighbors and keep a steady job and work in a soup kitchen and be happy and then, in a single moment, lose everything. But there's nothing we can do. We are destined to fulfill a certain fate, and no matter how hard we work or how nice we are to the neighbors or how steady our job is or how often we work in a soup kitchen or how happy we are, nothing can change the mind of fate.
So there are two ways we can take the message that Oedipus Rex leaves us with – one, do absolutely nothing because...what's the use? We have no control over what's going to happen to us, so if it's crappy, we might as well not waste our time trying to have a good life. Or two (the way I see it), just keep living the best you can and take no moment for granted because nothing in life is certain. Oedipus Rex is not a pessimistic story. It just so happens that Oedipus didn't have the nicest of fates, but that doesn't mean that happy endings are impossible. Sophocles is just saying, "Listen, your life might be good, and maybe it'll stay that way, but be careful not to count your chickens before they're hatched, alright?"
So just because I don't have children who also happen to be my siblings doesn't mean that I can't learn anything from Oedipus. In fact, despite the macabre nature of his end, I walk away from Oedipus Rex with a greater appreciation for how wonderful my life is but keeping in mind how many eggs are still left unhatched.