Oxen Of The Sun

These are just some ideas that I am tinkering with.  Unfortunately, I will not have time to return to this blog for several days, so enjoy the bulk of what I have so far, and I will hopefully have an extended and edited copy of this essay type blog by next week:

Metempsychosis:  the passing of the soul at death into another body either human or animal.

            This is the question that I am proposing for this blog: what vessel does the soul choose for safe passage into another body, and what is the tether that exists in-between bodies? 

I suppose it depends on who you ask, of course.  More importantly, a subjective definition of this concept of soul is relevant.  Regardless, for some, metempsychosis occurs in the act of listening to music.  For others, it occurs when gazing at a painting.  And yet, for others the act is more mystical—less definable.  A fleeting sunset perhaps, or a walk through thick woods…sunlight streaming through yellow and crimson foliage. 

I don’t really know what category best suits my preference: however, it does not matter—and the only purpose of this blog is to briefly discuss Joyce’s notion—which occurs in the episode Oxen of the Sun, in his novel Ulysses—that souls are transmitted unconsciously through the very language we sift through every day.  According to Joyce than: the history of language (more specifically the English language) seems to be continually in a state of gestation until the precise moment of utterance.  Therefore, language itself harbors souls from the past.  Before we expand on these concepts let us first consult Eliade for contextual information relating to this topic.

In the second chapter of Myth and Reality, Eliade chronicles the Hawaiian genelogical chant, which is a “recapitulation of the cosmogony, the history of the world, and the history of the tribe.”  In one of my recent blogs, I discussed the homologization of the writers Ovid, and Neruda into the general cosmogony.  In my experience with Joyce, I believe his striving to be remembered is perhaps stronger than both these poets—and his method of securing a place in illo-tempore derives from the omphaloskepsis that the reader experiences in trying to decipher meaning from his text.  What I mean by this last statement is this: Joyce saw the magnitude in a day, and he tried to capture ALL OF IT.  Yet because ideas can only be expressed through language—what is that we actually acquire when learning a language.

 And this is just some of the subject matter that is addressed in this episode.     

Anyway, back to Eliade’s statement above, and why this discussion of ceremony is so relevant when dealing with Joyce’s subject matter.  Eliade makes the point that some new born’s in this tribe are subject to this ceremony.  I think were Joyce departs from Eliade, is that he tries to display the English language as illo tempore, but is a landscape of forgetfulness: all souls and past lives exist in the language, we just need to remember.                 

My Poem

I came up with the idea (after class on Tuesday) that I would like to create my own poetic rendition of all of Ovid’s stories.  While this seems to be much more of a daunting task than I anticipated—writing poetry is really hard—I expect that these stories, or at least some of them, will be illuminated in my memory more so, than if I skimmed them, and wrote a short sentence on each.  So for this assignment, I think I am going to continually challenge myself to compose a poem on each book of the metamorphoses.  I think the reader will observe that, there is no Book 1, and book 2 is only partially completed.  As I said, writing poetry is really hard, and I think I will use the medium of the blog to continually update the composition of my rendition of Ovid’s stories:        

 PS: this poem will be privy to lots changes

Ovid,

Weaver of tales,

Please give me a language,

So that I may remember

All that was,

And all that ever will be. 

Ovid, Master of tales,

Let me taste that first violet sunrise,

And let me exhale all my sorrows—

In that last crimson sunset.

Ovid, let me tread a path that I already know so well—

But have forgotten.

Ovid, give my existence,

Give me a Light. 

Book II:         

As I gaze at the cosmos, a shooting star falls

Streaking the thick black film above.   

Is that you, brave Phaethon, falling out of the night sky? 

O Phaethon,

Your father, Phoebus, his heart is so broken now:

And you have left only scorched land in your wake. 

Look at the aired desert that surrounds Dear Dirty Bozeman. 

And look at this tree I lean against,

Look at the enormous globs of amber your sister’s the Heliades weep. 

Dear Phaethon, we cannot all follow in our father’s footsteps.

In fact, sometimes, it is best not to succumb to their sorrows.

And with tomorrows daylight,

Your father’s said heart will mount the chariot that ruined you. 

And yes,

Tomorrow there will be light,

But that light will be given in a pain that bathes all.

And where destruction emerges from such tragedy,

There Jove the powerful (a giver and taker of life) will be,

Mending the scorched land.   

With such a narcotic power, however,

And such a sense of masculine entitlement,

Look how easy it is for him to disguise himself—

After dutifully replenishing the earth—and to justify the rape of that virgin,

Callisto.

And what is to be of this nymph so duped,

By he who is supposedly so great.

This poor nymph is turned into a lonely bear, by jealous Juno.               

My First Memory

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

Marcel Proust

                It seems that the past manifest in memory is inescapable, and allusive: a bitter sweetness that floats on the air like fragrant pollen. Yet I cannot begin to think of my life as receding into shadow against this nostalgia; I cannot yet linger in the solitude of recollection.  My heart would break, burn—and turn into a fine ash scattered against time.  Perhaps such things—memory—should be left to old men. 

For the purpose of this blog however, I will venture into the caverns of my mind, and seek out my first memory.

  This memory passes through my mind every so often, and was originally triggered on a jog, in Georgia, several years ago.

There are moments when I jog, that I simply stop in the middle of my run; and before I reach my destination, I collapse in a state of utter exhaustion.  In such moments, I often feel a sense of detachment from reality; it is as if my perception slips into a gapping black void—and then suddenly my senses bring reality back into existence.  Several years ago, when I was in Georgia, visiting a family friend, one of my jogs produced such detachment.   And when I came to: a serene current of air struck my sense of smell—a smell that I cannot describe now—and displaced my sense of time.  I was no longer on a jogging trail hidden beneath a dense wood, shrouded in a heavy mist.  I was still in Georgia, that much was certain, yet my mind arrived at a specific Image, and a specific sound:

 Looking out the window from the floor of the kitchen, my lawn is pillowed in a moist mist.  The smell of the ground and the moisture wafts in.   There is a golden retriever named Shannon sniffing the top of my head.  The mist dissipates quickly, and a heavy rain takes its place.  There are purple flashes outside, followed every few seconds by heavy cracks of thunder. 

The window flashes completely white…my mother screams…and then the loudest noise I have ever heard. 

Several years later my dad tells me an old tree was struck by lightning in our yard, and put a gigantic hole through our roof, when we lived outside of Atlanta.                          

                    

I have no moral, or metaphysical doubts pertaining to such a statement: I am an anxious person disillusioned by the certainty of the unfathomable abyss (death), and all that exists in-between this statement—and that which I must inevitably encounter. This is of course a rather typical sentiment—and I know that I am far from being original by lending this idea its textual equivalent. Yet because this is such a typical sentiment—particularly in the field of literature, and literary theory (Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence in particular)—this subject matter is of course relevant in the contemporary study of myth.


So, for this blog, I will hopefully unveil why this subject matter is relevant, and where my ideas spawned from. To begin, let me start by documenting my morning.

This morning, I decided that I had adequate time to write a blog; yet I had no direction of where I should start, so I began reading Ovid. Consequently, a very curious thing happened to me while I was flipping through the pages of The Metamorphoses: it seemed as if I had been reading a text which was conceptually similar to something I had read recently. This déjà vu literary experience immediately prompted me to seek the work out. After a few scanning’s of my apartment, I found it collecting soot on my book shelf: Pablo Neruda’s Canto General. To affirm the parallel between Ovid’s text, and Neruda’s, I decided that I must finish Book 1 in The Metamorphoses, and then reread the first section of poems in the Canto General—A Lamp On Earth. Upon my completion of both texts, I found that the similarities were uncanny. So, this question begged to be asked: why was a text written 1900 years after Ovid using similar narrative motifs as Ovid. Because of this conundrum I had encountered, I decided to revisit an idea of Eliade’s that I had not invested very much time in.

At the beginning of the second chapter of Myth And Reality, Eliade states that: “EVERY mythical account of the origin of anything presupposes and continues the cosmogony. From the structural point of view, origin myths can be homologized with the cosmogonic myth.”

….This is of course a very intellectually loaded sentence; and because I care somewhat about the readability of my blog, and its eventual succession into the textual analysis of Neruda and Ovid, this quote will certainly benefit from an explication. To begin, it is perhaps necessary to define a few words. The first term I want to define is cosmogony: “any theory concerning the coming into existence or origin of the universe, or about how reality came to be (Wikipedia)”. The second is Homology: “Having structural likeness between corresponding parts of different plants or animals due to evolution from a common ancestor”. Quick note: while these two terms certainly have their place in the world of empirical study, the direction this blog needs to take will purely deal with the texts themselves, and the realties within the language. That being said, my interpretation of Eliade’s passage is this: varying origin myths do not attempt to contradict creation stories, rather, they extend the depth of the cosmogony by creating organic connections from a similar root. Eliade extends this idea by stating: “Every origin myth narrates and justifies a “new situation”—new in the sense that it did not exist from the beginning of World. Origin myths continue and complete the cosmogonic myth; they tell how the world was changed, made richer or poorer.”

…Finally I arrive at the textual analysis of these works through the filter of Eliade in this blog.

First, let us compare these two quotes:

My SOUL WOULD SING of metamorphoses. / But since, o gods, you were the source of these/ bodies becoming other bodies, breathe/ your breath into my book of changes: may/ the song I sing be seamless as its way/ weaves from world’s beginning to our day.

And:

Before the wig and dress coat/ there were rivers, arterial rivers/…Man was dust, earthen vase, an eyelid of tremulous loam…I am here to tell the story./ From the peace of the of the buffalo/ to the pummeled sands/ of the land’s end...My land without name, without America…word as yet unborn in my mouth.

Keep in mind these two quotes are just a few of the opening lines to both texts; yet parallel narrative motifs exist throughout both.

…And here it is: what my investigation has yielded me, and what my ideas on these prevalent parallelisms currently are: The reason these narrative motifs are similar, and continue to be similar throughout each work, is that each author earnestly believes in two things: 1. by setting the texts (the realties which they are creating in a mythic time of creation through the act of poetics, the works have the ability to transcend time, and arrive at a beginning where the authors are the god like figures who can for see, and construct all. 2. Both authors have a deep fear of the limited time that is allotted to them in life, so there seems to be a very active pursuit in securing existence as a supernatural being in some medium (literature in this case) which fuels the process of creating original mythic origin rather than merely just being the result of origin. By this, I mean the authors are aware of the homologizing effects that they command. Because these authors command this awareness, it seems that these works are not just collections of myths, and how the world came to be, but how they themselves came to be, and how they are ultimately apart of a cosmogony—time immemorial illo tempore.

If you don’t believe they have earnest hopes of living for ever read for yourself:

Ovid:

And now my work is done: no wrath of Jove
Nor fire nor sword nor time, which would erode
All things, has power to blot out this poem.

Neruda:

I am not going to die. I’m departing now,
On this day full of volcanoes,
For the multitudes, for life….
I’m staying here with words and people and roads
That await me again, and pound

On my door with their starry hands.

A work in progress

This is what I have so far for this meditation. I suppose there is nothing wrong with serializing a work in progress with the explicit purpose of having your peers’ commentary.




Sometimes, in our search for meaning, it is impossible to find anything of substance, or depth to write about. The very act of writing at times can seem like a constraint: a trap that attempts to bedrock that part of the mind—feelings which are most inconsistent—to a sensible logocentric vantage point. However, the more I try to counter these elusive feelings (and battle with form and style) the more often I have a recurring and distinct epiphany: even the most mundane of things can create vast permutations on the reality in which we exist…

So, is existence merely the “ineluctable modality of sight”, or something “more”?



In this blog then, I want to perhaps lightly tread the surface of my search for an origin, in a recollection of a moment conjured through memory (a memory from this summer) saturated by my present feelings of elusiveness, and present existential dilemma’s. This memory will also serve as an instance suspended in time for the purpose of theoretical debate. To begin—and please bear with me—I would like to discuss myth, and its relationship in the creation of reality according to Eliade.

In Eliade’s study of myth (Myth And Reality) he is quite comprehensive in making the argument that Myth is not merely fable (prevalent cultural fiction) but a true, and experienced reality maintained through repition. The function of myth thus supplies every level of meaning to one’s existence. In particular, it functions by returning one’s existence to a time of origin—a time without time—a time when supernatural beings created various realities that swerve into a singular reality. Thus myth (these creation stories) and these supreme realities are one in the same, and can be conjured into present reality if their knowledge is preserved in esoteric tradition. This definition is of course quite thorough, and is partial to my previous ponderings on myth.

I will now discuss my memory as enters this moment. It is of course fabricated by own perception of myself:

Standing on a slick platform covered in rain water, my hand has a firm grip on the railing so as to keep my balance In case the wind picks up some more. I am observing a vast expanse of mountain ranges in glacier national park, and they are still patched heavily with snow. There is a dense forest some 2 to 3 thousand feet beneath me, and solemn cloud that keeps