sparagmos, sparagmos

Sparagmos, Sparagmos, you're tearing me apart. You're ripping out my heart. I feel like I've been torn to shreds.

Sparagmos is apparently everyhwere.

Dr. Keeler read us "Kneeling Down to Peer into a Culvert" by Robert Bly in 550 today. The end of it reads, " I am alone, with no duties, living as I live. / Then one morning a head like mine pokes from the water. /I fight—it’s time, it’s right—and am torn to pieces fighting."

Tennesse Williams includes the concept in Suddenly Last Summer where "Each male protagonist is pursued, ripped apart, and consumed by the members of a community he sexually infiltrated. The truth about each sparagmos (rending) and omophagia (raw-eating) is uncovered in similar scenes between “psychotherapist” and amnesia victim. But while the truth brings destruction to each murdered man’s mother, only in Suddenly Last Summer is anyone saved by the awful revelation (Janice Siegel, “Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer and Euripides’ Bacchae,” IJCT 11 (2004-2005), pp. 538-570).

We figuratively incorporate sparagmos, I think, in many cultural ways, including, but not limited to wills (particularly contested ones) and how we treat celebrities and political figures. Of course, it's present in the eucharist and in the myth of Dionysus.

Sue tells me sparagmos is in the myth of Isis and Osiris. Dr. Sexson referred me to Ovid's Metamorphosis. Let me know if you have any hot leads for me.

deja vu

Today, I illuminated Kacie, Jamie, Arianna, Jimmy and Ed about my deju vu epiphany. I was thinking that if archetypes repeat themselves continuously and ubiquitously- in literature, in dreams, in life - then deja vu could be nothing more than our recognition/recollection of and fitting into an archetype. And...since, according to Hillman, people in dreams are just spirits who take on the appearance of those we know, deja vu is just the repetition of an archetype which is now personalized and tailored to us.

So...deja vu is not us remembering something that happened to us; deja vu is us tapping into an unconscious archetype. I don't know if that makes sense to any of you, but it makes great sense to me and my very strong, weight-lifting brain.

Jamie tried to give me some "logical" and "realistic" scientific explanation about how deja vu is just our brains misfiring and sending our short-term memories into our long-term memories or some scientific mumbo-jumbo like that. But, I'm not buying it. My explanation is far more credible. :)

Frye - popular culture chart

This is a site that Dr. Sexson recommended to me and that all of you may find useful.

http://virtual.clemson.edu/groups/dial/sfclass/Fryechar.htm

It brings Frye's categories into popular culture.

The Surreal Michael Earl Craig

Part of the Wikipedia definition of surrealism goes like this. Surrealism is a movement “asserting that liberation of the human mind …can be achieved by exercising the imaginative faculties of the ‘unconscious mind’ to the attainment of a dream-like state different from, or ultimately ‘truer’ than, everyday reality.”
I have to say, I didn’t feel particularly liberated after reading Craig’s collection of poems – confused, sometimes – disturbed, sometimes – but never liberated. Let me open the door to my mind and walk you through what might be my typical reaction to one of his poems.

“I’m Glad I Found The Horse Doc”
(Oh…a poem about a vet)

Another day, not
even drinking coffee on
the toilet makes me smile.
(ha ha ha – that’s a funny example, but probably a pleasant-enough
experience to make one smile.)

Today so apparent: someone
Should have kicked Kinski’s
Nosferatu in the nuts
HARD.
(ha, ha – that’s funny, too. I should know who Nosferatu is.
I better google it)
Or duct-taped him
to a pool table & raped him with a carrot.
(WHAT? Weren’t we just trying to think pleasant thoughts about
coffee and toilets?)

As a unit of nourishment
my cheeseburger comes at me
through the drive-up window.
(How'd we get to the drive-thru, and who calls a burger a unit?
How does it come at him?)

& later the local horse doc with
a fleck of placenta on his cheek
I put a hand on his shoulder
(He’s got placenta on his cheek?
How does Craig know it’s placenta?
I’m confused.)
I tell him “draw a face on
the side of your hand you’ll have a friend all day.”
Who says this to a grown man? I’ll
bet that the vet responded, “My
friend feels like punching you, jerk.”)

He tell me “one man’s journey
the inverse of another’s”
(Huh?)

So, this is pretty typical of my experience. Despite my foreknowledge that the poetry was surreal, I tricked myself into believing that the next poem would be a nice, realistic piece. This is probably attributable to several factors. First, according to English 510, my expectation of realism comes from the society around me, where everything must be “real.” I buy into that. Also, the poems contributed to all the trickiness by starting out somewhat normally. Then, out of nowhere, children would be licking bookshelves, brain-eating parasites would be headed for cake, and unfortunate people would be plagued with a particularly nasty asshole type of halitosis. What? Yep, you’ve lost me. Contrary to my mind being liberated, it’s just somewhat confounded. This is not to say that I hate the poems; I liked more than several of them, including “In the Januaried Mountains” and “I Rattled Off to Work Today.” I even liked “The Accomplished Hand” – that is, until the crowd turned into an angry amoeba about to beat the hairless woman.
Yep. All in all, I’m left wondering, Am I supposed to understand these and don’t? Is there some logic here? Ultimately, I don’t feel quite as bad as Craig does, like “a turd washed up on the shore of a quiet lake at a child’s birthday party,” “like one of the world’s largest assholes,” or “like a seahorse with his throat slit.” But, I don’t feel real great, either.

Dream persons - Hillman p.59-64

Here are notes from Hillman's section on dream persons. Please enjoy.

THE PERSONS I ENGAGE WITH IN DREAMS ARE NEITHER REPRESENTATIONS OF THEIR LIVING SELVES NOR PARTS OF MYSELF. THEY ARE SHADOW IMAGES THAT FILL ARCHETYPAL ROLES; THEY ARE MASKS, IN THE HOLLOW OF WHICH IS A NUMEN (SPIRIT)

3 approaches to dream persons
1. Freudian “Other people are essential for understanding dream persons” (takes you back to the actuality of the day)
Freud’s method of interpretation projects people in dreams back over the bridge into the dream day
2. Jungian “My personality is essential for understanding dream persons” (takes you back to subject as an expression of a person’s complexes)
Jung’s method takes the dream people into the subject of the dreamer – they become an expression of my psychic traits
In neither method do we ever truly leave the personal aspect of the dream persons- we remain engaged in the upperworld
3. Archetypal – “Only the persons of the dreams are essential for understanding the persons in the dream” (takes you back to the underworld of psychic images. They become mythic beings – not mainly by amplifying their mythic parallels but by seeing through to the imaginative persons within the personal masks)

Shadow figure or shades are not the people themselves or even the people’s essence
(older brother example – neither the actual brother nor the older, responsible traits)
Because the older brother is now a shade in the underworld, he is a purely psychic form
Teacher example in a dream is not only some intellectual potential of my psychic wholeness. More deeply, this figure is the archetypal mentor who, for now, in this dream, wears the robes of this schoolteacher or that professor.

Like in Homeric hymns, the god appears to the dreamer in the guise of a living friend.
(Egyptian) At the psychic level of existence, the essential image of our personal self, who is our shadow soul, is at the same time an image of a God.
In dreams, we are visited by nymphs, heroes and gods shapes like our friends of last evening.

The essence of the person is in the name.
One of the ways of restoring the “embracing vision of the myth” to the persons of last evening who have entered the dream is to look at their names. In their names are their souls.

Names are things in themselves – they do not represent something else where embodied by the name, but they are presentations of the mind to itself of its own presence. The name is the divine logos clothed in the person of the dream. We must find names for the figures or look more deeply into the names that are given. P.63

Embracing vision of the myth
No longer: Ego casting Shadow after it; instead, a shade literalizing an ego in front of it and behind which it can remain hidden.
Shadow figures in dreams – we should regard them LESS through their relations with the world and more as a reflection of the shades

550 poems

I preferred Jimmy’s poem “Prophet Township” to mine, so I used it for my starting point.

“Nostalgia”

In those days, people weren’t granted the luxury of prolonged grieving,
Even if their present was lived in life’s valleys.
There was no time for deeper questions
Or deeper pain
With work to be done.

A pause by you will not pause life.

While you sit in your chair with your head in your hands,
The snow will still be falling.
The fire left unstoked and unfed will be burning down to ashes.
Questions won’t keep you warm.

Divinity?
Yes, there’s a loved one in the attic until spring,
But thinking about it won’t get you “through till spring.”
Folded hands won’t break the ice on the horse trough.

Right now the ground is too hard to probe for the meaning of life
Or death
Especially when you have to actually live one in order to stay a step ahead of the other.

Those questions are better left for spring.


I had a really hard time finding a poem I hated, let alone one I disliked intensely. I settled on one that confounded me, “Some Last Questions” by W.S. Merwin. I'm sure that if I give it enough thoughtful contemplation, I will like it. In fact, after rereading it a couple times, this is becoming the case. But, I still don't completely understand it, and I find his imagery disturbing. I’m fairly certain that he’s talking about the dead body. But, I also think he’s using multiple definitions of some words, like feet (stumps, like the one’s attached to auction paddles) and hands (farm-hands or deck-hands). Nonetheless, I still don’t entirely understand it.

“Some Last Questions”

What is the head
A. Ash
What are the eyes
A. The wells have fallen in and have
Inhabitants
What are the feet
A. Thumbs left after the auction
No what are the feet
A. Under them the impossible road is moving
Down which the broken necked mice push
Balls of blood with their noses
What is the tongue
A. The black coat that fell off the wall
With sleeves trying to say something
What are the hands
A. Paid
No what are the hands
A. Climbing back down the museum wall
To their ancestors the extinct shrews that will
Have left a message
What is the silence
A. As though it had a right to more
Who are the compatriots
A. They make the stars of bone

I don’t feel right satirizing this poem because there is undoubtedly a beautiful and deeper meaning that I, in my superficiality and ignorance, am missing. So, I’ve decided to take his approach, but address the body as it is living, instead of as it is dead.

What is the head
A. Means to insight
What are the eyes
A. Full of and for sight – therefore insightful, too
What are the feet
A. Marching in a poetic unit
No what are the feet
A. Under them many roads are moving
They are a solid base
What is the tongue
A. A flash of fire that licks up the wall
No what is the tongue
A. Tasting
What are the hands
A. Holding on and letting go
What is the silence
A. As if noise were better
Who are the compatriots
A. They make the silence more precious

paper ideas

I'm intrigued with the idea of sparagmos - particularly in the myth of Dionysus and how that myth is related to the Christian eucharist. How Jesus and Dionysus suffer - Dionysus by being pruned every year in the form of the grape vine - how he is reborn with each new growing season - how men feel like they are taking "in" Dionysus himself when they consume wine. Perhaps there are other characters like this in other religious and cultural traditions. There's probably a paper topic idea here. Hmmm...Ideas, anyone?

And, Wayne got me thinking about dream-catchers with all of his animal talk. I'm not sure if dream-catchers can be made into a paper topic or not. Maybe something along the lines that what the spider has made is more important than the spider itself...animals are representative of something else, and the web represents the spider, which represents something else... I did a little bit of reading on dream-catchers, and one site said that the dream-catchers aren't meant to last, reflecting the temporary state of youth. There comes a time when a child can't be protected from experience and, in fact, needs experience and knowledge to function in an adult world.

The dream-catcher has similarities to this picture my friend took of the Brooklyn Bridge when we were in New York in January.