All-In-All

There have been ups and downs.  Pros and cons.  Fun times, and then less-than-fun times.  My doctrine has been questioned, my little world rattled.  I've been challenged to think.  Really...think.

I've trekked through the woods of a nature reserve, observed every scene of a three-hour play, and blogged twice a week, every week, for the past fifteen weeks or so.  And I have learned.

I've read stories about horses with wings, a man with wings, a Hindu woman in love with Christianity, and a mentally retarded American in love with Russia.  I've read more poems than I can recount: certainly more than I had read in all my life before this class (at least what has been deemed professionally poetic).

I've been challenged to appreciate nature more.  I've been challenged to love humanity more.  I've been challenged to throw my thoughts into the fire and see if they really do hold up.

Introduction to Literature has been my favorite class this semester.  It was taken seriously by the professor, and taken beyond the depths of a conventional class, as well.  To say my favorite is to say that it hasn't been a cakewalk, and that there were parts I didn't enjoy.  But that I learn and/or walk away better than when I walked into the classroom.  This isn't to reassure the ego of the professor or to massage a few more points into my grade.  If so, I would have stopped blogging when the last assignment was due.

All this is to say, though, not just that I learned.  It's that, all-in-all, I've changed.  And I dare say for the better.  Thank you, Professor Corrigan.  Thank you, classmates.  And thank you, God, for pardoning my ignorance long enough to catch somewhat of a greater glimpse of who you are.  Because I would venture to say, God, that literature is a thing you do.



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The Cleverness of the Characters Cast: Interpreting the Persons of Descartes

                The narrator of the story recounts the phone conversation he had earlier.  His interview subject suggested they have tea together.  He recalls the homework he had done on his interview subject: the careers she has had throughout the years.  She had brought audiences to their feet and governments to their knees in her lifetime, both within the frame of artistic beauty.

                When he catches his first real glimpse of her, through a mirror’s reflection in a café pillar, he stops to observe the breath-taking beauty that is Madame Descartes.  Even in her old age, she still had an unmistakable elegance about her.

                After introducing himself and apologizing for his tardiness, he fumbles with his notebook and begins busily taking notes.  She replays her career as a performer and a model, a photographer and writer, alongside her love life and her interests.  She recalls with faint and distant sadness the horrors of war and the violent deaths that ensued.

                Then, without skipping a beat, she asks the narrator to “put your notebook down’ I’ve/Decided to take your picture.”  As he tries to ready himself for the suddenness of becoming her subject, instead of the other way around, he is intrigued at “the small café table/Which Madame had so easily turned.”

                In the first read, things seem to be going easily enough.  This is due, in part, to the fact that there is no clash of perspectives.  It’s just the narrator’s.  So then why, at the end, is Madame not quite the woman we had first imagined?  And why is the narrator not quite as talented with spoken words as he is with thoughts?

                The tale of this afternoon tea with the Madame offers a good look at two very interesting types of personalities.  Not much is said about David St. John, the author of this poetic piece of literature, in his narration.  But when we look within the narration, the way he acts and then reacts to Madame Descartes, as well as the way she reacts to him, we can see into his character and learn something about this reporter.  Secondly, we have Madame Descartes, who seems the retired showgirl, but is much more the wizened cynic than most will ever know.

                He (St. John) walks into this story, and he doesn’t seem to lack a sense of confidence.  He’s a writer, and he works hard.  And he’s taken an interest in this latest subject of his, Madame Descartes.

                Madame Descartes, St. John has discovered, has a beauty so ageless that St. John calls her reflection “unmistakable”, and so unique he finds it “riveting/As the Unicorn’s/Soft eye.”  From the text we can interpret a woman who knows the life of a goddess.  Many of us wonder what it must be like: to be instantly liked, constantly sought after, inadvertently pleased (because it seems that such a pretty, likeable-looking face shouldn’t be walked all over by this less-appealing world).  She knows what it’s like.

                And here is where St. John accidentally slips the first glance of a self-portrait: “Her beauty/Was so close to a vengeance—one exacted by the world/Upon those of us so ordinary, so weak, we can barely/Admit its existence.  So I just sat there…”

                He then goes on to tell us more about Descartes.  She provides to her interview a look at the glamorous life of the pretty people.  So what happens?  She gets bored.  She “took several lovers” and then “the fatigue set in.”  She just keeps getting bored!  Poor thing doesn’t even know (or perhaps it’s that she’s grown too numb to care) that St. John, and billions of others on this planet, would love to have her life.

                Alas, though, since multiple lovers will not satiate her search for happiness, she gets married.  This, too, grows old quickly.  And that was when Descartes stumbled upon photography.  She uses this latest love of hers to document the grotesque images of war (which, of course, our ill culture eats up) and attains even more fame and riches!  Yet still, she seems unimpressed with the world and, if it can be of any shock to you, bored.  Not completely, though…We find out at the very end of the story that, while St. John has been taking notes on Descartes, Descartes has been taking note of St. John.

                “‘And now,’ she said, ‘put your notebook down; I’ve/Decided to take your picture.”  She’s intrigued by this little man, who I’m imagining is actually quite a nervous and confidence-lacking individual.  I derived this from the way he calls himself “ordinary” and “weak” and spends so much of the poem/short story just reflecting on her physical attractiveness.

                In these last few lines, then, we stumble upon something even greater than the famous Madame Descartes, and it is that the famous Madame Descartes has become intrigued by this reporter.  Intrigued enough to make him into one of her works of art.  If she were to give it a twenty-first century name, one could imagine she might name it “Zac Smith”.

                St. John finishes the story with my favorite lines of the entire literary piece.  I have already shared the last few words, but it is the collective lines that provide the greatest insight.  (I am just now feeling, with some interest and some sadness, as well, that the this “greatest insight” might actually be an insight into myself.  Did I pick this piece because it reminded me…of me?)

                “Before her consoling wink, I simply sat back, trying somehow/To smile, to look worldly, desirable, nonchalant—/My hands so self-consciously gripping the small café table/Which Madame had so easily turned.”

                In the end, this is really who these two characters ultimately are: Madame being the character who turns tables, and St. John being the character who wants so badly to entertain the small thought that he is someone that someone might be interested in, someone who spends far too much time admiring beauty while “self-consciously gripping” this small table where he thought he knew, for sure, how to posture himself.

                I’m not so sure at all how this interpretation matters.  But I think I can finally tell you why.  From the first time I read “My Tea with Madame Descartes”, I genuinely felt like I was the narrator: hard-working, a bit of an odd ball who finds the lives of has-beens so fascinating, self-conscious and nervous, and “trying somehow/To smile, to look worldly, desirable, nonchalant…”

                And I admit—with some shame but in all truth—that I’m just kind of hoping that one day I’ll find the Madame Descartes within myself, and maybe even one day out in the world, who finds me so fascinating that they want to take my picture.  Could ya’ imagine that?  Someone, for my artistic appeal and in my attempt to “look…desirable, nonchalant”, wanting me…

A Tale for Adults

What is to be said of this strange visitor?

With weathered wings, home to parasites and musty filth, washes up on the shores of a forsaken beach.  Is he the harbinger of death that the old woman next door predicts?  Is he a suspicious character as the Father has concluded?

I love the picture painted at the beginning of this story: this common couple is fending off the crowds of crabs seeking shelter from the torrential storm pouring outside.

This decrepit old creature of myth, lying on the shores in their backyard.  What explains this?

People flock to this couple's meager shack on this glum ocean's edge to observe the mythical beast being kept prisoner in a chicken pen.  So is he really there by force?  I somehow doubt it.  So then...why?

This is the question that kept bothering me the whole time I was reading this short story.  When the creature opens his wings in reflex, a hurricane wind is pushed from his body.  The few hairs on his head are white.  Only a few teeth reside within his mouth.

It is only at the end of the story that we receive the biggest clue about this "angel".  He makes an amateur attempt at flight.  Which means...he doesn't know how.

So...does he only have a few hairs on his head because they are the first to grow from his scalp?  Has he but a few ivories from his gums because he is just now teething?

So then...the Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is a babe, I suppose.  But why?

And that is when I remembered the rest of the title: A Tale for Children.

It reminded me of a children's film I watched recently, called Ponyo.  At first, the story didn't make much sense, but then I tried to see the story from a child's eyes...and it made so much more sense!

And so, seeing "A Very Old Man with enormous with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children" from children's perspectives begins to paint that very first portrait I loved so much in an entirely new light, with entirely new colors.

So now, as we've learned in this class, the picture must be painted again, starting from the very beginning.

"On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night..."

A newborn babe...and a newborn angel.  One sick, the other washed up on the shore.  And in the end, their baby will fly.  It will be a pain along the way, a relief at the end, and a blessing every step of the way.

Perhaps, then, this story could also be a tale for adults.

Omelas Sounds Like Omelets

We just read the story by Ursula K. Le Guin entitled "The One Who Walk Away from Omelas", and I am here to tell you that Omelas sounds like Omelets.

That being said, I found this story to be very trippy.  And yet...I kinda liked it.  Granted, I didn't like it nearly as much as, say, "Temple of the Holy Ghost".  But it was still good.

What struck me most, and I'll be sure to share this in the class quiz tomorrow, was a line that said "The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy..."

In this statement, Le Guin is saying that there is a right kind of joy and a wrong kind of joy.  Omelas, at first glance, is a very socialist version of Ethiopia.  There is no war; there is only peace.  There is celebration.  There is happiness.  And then that statement was made, and we find that ultimately this Ethiopia is dictating what is right and wrong.  And there, in and of itself, is reason for controversy.

My thoughts aren't coming together because I'm much too tired and relish too much in the art of rambling.  But we'll see what becomes of my rambling.

The story would have been awful without the role of the "it" tucked away in the storm cellar.  But I feel pretty confident that Le Guin wrote this story FOR that character, and this is the reason why I find this story to be decent.

This character, clothed in nothing but a shroud of darkness and trembling in its feces, represents the humanity of humanity.  Who we really are, when we stuff our imperfections in a basement, is the evil that exists in our soul.  The reason why the human race created by God is different from the Omelasians is because we are redeemable.  God has set forth the process of being redeemed and we can be within reach.  Why?

Because we're trying?  As a societal whole, we are trying to be better.  There are those in the world that don't.  But I really have to believe that there is more desperation for right than a satiating of lust for wrong.

The Omelasians, though, are all quite aware of their humanity--their fleshliness--and instead of improving life for everyone for the ground up, the bottle that which they deem unworthy and "the right kind of joy", or the right kind of entertainment, or the right kind of PERSON, as it would eventually become, is all that's allowed in daylight.

And that's the Omelets for you.