Goal for meeting next Friday: present Mr. Sexson with a three page "plan of attack". Essentially, a rough-draft for the beginning of the paper, in which I am to focus most acutely upon Gnosis and Imagination "understood as". Because for my studying purposes, narrowing the focus is vital, especially in as broad-reaching a topic as Gnosticism. This also seems to be were I am having the most difficulty with; I seem to have the urge to read everything that can be read by the Romantics and about Gnosticism, which of course is impossible in the span of time available to us for this purpose.

So, my three-page plan of attack is likely to focus upon the chosen understanding of Gnosis and Imagination to be employed, which it is looking like will be about like this:

1. Self-knowledge as knowledge of God
2.Hence, one in possesion of gnosis becomes a kind of creator or artist; "divine in the world" as it were. The notion of apotheosis becomes central here.
It would probably be a good idea to discuss the idea of the Aesthetic Hero, as it relates to gnosis and the Romantic imagination as well.
4. The diminished trope of illumination to be found in Modernism: "matches struck in the dark" in To the Lighthouse, linked with Shelley's celestial fire, and with the Gnostic idea of the "spark" or "flame" to be found inside.

See, all of this is complex enough without Kari trying to make it even more so. We shall see how it ends up developing.

Blog Resurrected for LIT 470

From here on the entries in the blog will be for the independent study on Gnosticism and the British Romantics. I am a little remiss in beginning, but it is happening now.

It has been decided, for the sake of ease and(hopefully)resultant expertise, to try and narrow the scope of inquiry to the relation between Gnosis and Imagination. How does the Gnostic view of gnosis(knowledge) relate or intersect with the Romantic poets' view of the imagination?

I may take a starting cue from Coleridge, from chapter 13 of his Biographia Literaria.

"The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation with the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify."

If this sounds rather like Stevens' Idea of Order at Key West it probably isn't just me that would detect the similarity. If the Primary Imagination is where all the source of creativity lies, is the utmost expression of it, then the Secondary Imagination is the watered down, more commonly operating immination of the Primary Imagination, which I suspect is the level at which anagogy operates(and that at which truly sublime art is made). And if the power to create is what designates one as a Creator(or a Demiurge) then the Artist is akin to God, or perhaps in touch with God that is inside.

I think I have stumbled into something, and intend to expound upon it in further entries.

I'm never sure how I feel about this, doing the "last" of something. I keep thinking to myself, what happens after? But of course there really is no "last" or "final", because everything just goes on. As will I, in having epiphanies and being enlarged by them, and trying in vain to comprehend clearly what it all truly meant, and in the trying is where the knowing comes, even though I will not know it at the time. If this sounds nonsensical, probably it is. But that's alright. I have moved beyond praise and blame(at least I'd like to have!).

And so on we all will go to the lighthouse, and the Gates of Dawn, and to the Battlefield and to the river as it runs by swerve of shore to bend of bay.

The rest is silence.*





*which is golden

The day for our en masse recitations of the Four Quartets has been moved to April 30, on which date we must arrive at 8:30. The good news about this is that there will be no final on Finals week. Thank you Mr. Sexson!

I think that this was a thoroughly intimidating batch of final papers; I would say that I was cowed and intimidated by them, and this would be true. But(at the risk of sounding Pollyanna-ish or something like that), I wasn't bothered in the least by this or threatened by them. Rather, I basked in the glow of their achievement: Sam's reader's diary, Doug's touching life story interpreted through Tarot, Katie's transforming of her misfortunes into epiphanic experiences, Mick and his passionate poem, Nick and his great concluding treatise on silence and epiphanies. And as Nick said, this has been a great batch of creative intellectual minds at work here. He said it better than I could, and I am happy for this. The rest is silence.

We talked today about the last act of Hamlet being the epicenter of the ontological(having to do with the nature of reality) argument, with Hamlet finally coming into his own, with the understanding of his own part in the play that is life. But this was his dark epiphany, seeing that all of life was a play. So how can his good epiphany be the knowing of his own role in the play? This is where mysticism--seeing the recollection of opposites--comes into play(pun intended).

Abby posted a blog about Horatio, saying that he is Sanjaya: it is the job of both to chronicle the events in their respective dramas, and to be the ones who are detached in the right kind of way. Really, this is probably the first study of Hamlet which I've participated in that gives Horatio his dues--he tends to be devalued as a soundboard/sidekick for Hamlet. But what if, in a way, he ends up being the true hero of the story?

And I now need to read Borges' story The Secret Miracle, where time stops at the moment of annihalation, ala Bhagavad Gita and just as Kevin talks about.

Readiness is all. Always.

I've been somewhat remiss in blogging about our sacred duty( the Gita and Hamlet). But I think I shall now, if only to say that I now have found a way to finally read Hamlet in a truly satisfying context--understand me, I do not (like TS Eliot)deny its aesthetic stature; its just never been my favorite Shakespeare play--. With an eye to epiphanic insight, Hamlet becomes very enlightening, more so than it maybe was already.

Yes, Hamlet in Act 5 is changed. He has had an epiphany, having I would guess to do with the attack on the ship by pirates, but he won't say, and the play doesn't present it to us. And at the moment of his death, Hamlet acknowledges the insight he has gained: "You that look pale and tremble at this chance,/That are but mutes or audiences to this act,/Had I but time(as this fell sargeant Death/Is strict in his arrest)-O, I could tell you-/But let it be. Horatio, I am dead."(5.2-319-322) We the mutes and audiences are left, along with Horatio, to figure out what it was that Hamlet had come to know. What was it? The necessity of right action? The need for time and playing your part within the play that is life? I ask these things because I don't know for certain. But it is so. Quite possibly so.

Repetition: By next week we are advised to have a thesis statement for our papers, up on our blog or elsewhere. And of course, blogging about other people's great blogs(Sam and Nick's probably take the cake but my oh my the competition is stiff), and blogging about the connection between the Bhagavad Gita and Hamlet, in particular Act 5 which is so different from the four previous acts.

Because Hamlet has had a very dark epiphany in the first half of the play: that the world is corrupt and everything artificial, everyone acting a part(note the frequency of the words "play", "put-on", "act" and "perform"). This ties in interestingly with the Sanskrit(I think?) word maya--the world as illusion. But by Act 5 what has Hamlet realized? What epiphany has he had?

It may well have something to do with detachment, which Tayloring Taylor so cogently brought up. We've suggested, via the Gita and the Four Quartets, that this is seeing thing with an equal eye--the learned scholar and the dog and the man that eats the dog being the same thing. And it is also the stage wherein you move beyond praise and blame because praise and blame are the same thing. This is hard to grasp, I know. But then that's the point.

Well, Kari has now officially declared her paper topic: an examination of the anxiety of influence and the the epiphanies of time/history through and in War and Peace. Which the unabridged Mahabarahata is even thicker and heavier than.

I liked the quote from Aldous Huxley that was brought up in class today: "All roads lead to Rome, provided it is Rome you are going to." And what determines where we are going to, Rome or otherwise? Our sacred duty, and bhakti, the way of devotion, be it to Krishna, Jesus, Allah or to some other avatar which our devotion turns to center upon. It was mentioned in class that the Bhagavad Gita, read at a superficial level(which means it will sadly be read that way often)seems to justify or uphold the orthodox Hindu caste system. In reality, this is a narrow limited way of looking at the text, which when read at a deeper level calls you beyond class boundaries; and boundaries of all types.

And we have more conversations about Hamlet, in which the avenging of his father is perhaps a metaphor for sacred duty. And the Ghost intones "Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me." in Act 1, scene five line 91. And this is the still point of the drama, the moment the most vital of commands is given.

Something that Kari has been wondering about is the connections, if that can even be the word we want to use, between Yahweh and Krishna.

I fell to ruminating about the Book of Job in the Hebrew scriptures after reading the Tenth Teaching in the Bhagavad Gita, entitled in this translation "Fragments of Divine Power". Arjuna asks Krishna "Recount in full extent/the discipline and power of your self;/Krishna, I can never hear enough/of your immortal speech." Krishna responds by saying, in effect, that he is absolutely everything: "I am the self abiding/in the heart of all creatures/I am their beginning,/their middle and their end." These descriptions go on for a few pages, and then in the next chapter Arjuna sees the vision for which words were not enough to comprehend. This may be an indicative things about sublime epiphanic experiences, that even "divine speech" cannot make it comprehendible in all its great and terrible beauty.

This made me think of Yahweh(God) in the book of Job, whom it is still very hard not to view as a sadistic prick on a power trip. He when he finally appears to Job out of the whirlwind and says "Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you shall declare to me." (Chapter 38, verse 3, Revised Standard Version) This is equivalent in many respects to Krishna calling Arjuna a coward at the beginning of the Gita, but still it somehow strikes me as more harsh and severe. But the lists of divine power and sheer capacity are quite similar. One particular similarity which I found striking was the power of the horse.

From the Gita: "Among horses, know me as the immortal stallion/born from the sea of elixir;/among elephants, the divine king's mount;/among men, the king."

From the book of Job: "Do you give the horse his might? Do you clothe his neck with strength?Do you make him leap like the locust? His majestic snorting is terrible. He paws in the valley, and exults in his strength; he goes out to meet the weapons. He laughs not at fear, and is not dismayed; he does not turn back from the sword. Upon him rattle the quiver, the flashing spear and the javelin. With fierceness and rage he swallows the ground; he cannot stand still at the sound of the trumpet. When the trumpet sounds, he says "Aha!" He smells the battle from afar, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting. (Chapter 39, verse 19-25)

Perhaps I am stretching in search of a connection between these stories, but I couldn't help but think of it. And, hard though it is for my tiny-little mind to grasp the notion, perhaps they are talking about the same thing on a certain level. Or perhaps not. Kari doesn't know, but Kari will perhaps pursue this consideration further if she can.

We are to blog, from now until the end(if indeed there is such a thing) on The Bhagavad Gita and Hamlet, because it is from these texts that the rest of what we are to know will emanate. Because Hamlet and Arjuna have the same problem: they cannot act, and do what they must do. Arjuna has Krishna, and Hamlet has another avatar: the Ghost, who is essentially a secular version of Krishna.

Both avatars are here for the sake of reminding their respective pupils of their sacred duty, which we have suggested is thus: the the thing that you would do even if you weren't required to do it.

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." This is a great example of a synechoche(a part which represents the whole), so "Denmark" really means "the whole world and the whole of life".
Similarly, the battlefield in the Gita is a metaphor for all of human life, and so the call to violence isn't a literal call to killing, but a call to do what you must do. This is why Gandhi, a great practioner of nonviolence, was so influenced by the text.

I look forward to seeing the portion from Peter Brooks' film version of the Mahabarata(sp?), the long Hindu epic of which the Bhagavad Gita is one portion of. The voice of the Mahabarata, as a whole, including the Gita is Sanjaya, and Sanjaya is the poet.

And by this time next week, we are to tentatively have a thesis for our papers up and viewable. Kari thinks that she shall do something with War and Peace but she is so intensely percieving the anxiety of influence that she may end up wondering "To be or not to be." We shall see.

Back from break and onto the Gita and Hamlet. By way of duty(as opposed to sacred duty, though indeed perhaps there is only a hairsbreadth, nose-tipped distinction), our individual presentations begin on April 9, in our group order reversed. These will be turned in to Mr. Sexson, who will be serving the function, here and now, of an avatar(a divine being coming down to the mortal world and assuming mortal form for the sake for the instruction of mortal beings). Because really we all need some kind of avatar, do instruct us in the comprehension of sacrifice. Sacrifice literally means "to make sacred" and it is our dharma( sanscrit for "duty", though often translated as "truth" or "responsibility" which may seem less stringent than duty) which can lead us to sacrifice in the correct way.

But it had to be pointed out, that the Bhagavad Gita and To the Lighthouse intersect, on page 63, where Mrs. Ramsey and the Lighthouse are one. This is the notion from the Vedic scriptures, whereby atman and brahman are one and the same. There is no distinction between the divine being and the Self. Leave it to Virgina to understand this and apply it to the dishwater dull common life.

Our assignment over spring break is to read Hamlet and The Bhagavad Gita.These will be the two texts which will be most central to the latter half of the class, and especially to the development of our term papers, which we are advised to postpone thinking about until after we have read these two works(holy mouthful sentence!).

We discussed To the Lighthouse and its connections with another poem by Wallace Stevens, To an Old Philosopher in Rome, itself an elegy, and also a consideration on the space where we have epiphanies: the threshold of heaven, on the street.

And we also talked about Kevin's blog, in which he went off on a magnificent defense of To the Lighthouse on the grounds of its practicality. I also loved his observation, closely aligned with that of practicality, that the book presents Inscape as a way, not only of looking at the world, though it is that too, but as a way of looking at ourselves. When we are able to perceive other things in the way in which they truly are themselves(a table, a chair, a boat) than we can perhaps be able to perceive ourselves for what they truly are. This ties back so very interestingly with Vladimir Nabokov's Transparent Things. Is this what N. was on about in that book, which also has the typical response from readers of "I don't like it", and "I don't understand it." Just goes to show that the anagogic level requires a mysterious mental maneuver to gain entrance to.

It appears that I am something of an anomaly(this seems to happen with disturbing regularity, but never mind), in that I am one of the few members of class who actually likes To the Lighthouse. But as Mr. Sexson said yesterday, it perfectly fits into the two categories for qualifying as Highbrow Literature: the responses are 1. I don't like it and 2. I don't understand it.

But at the same time, we find that it is truly replete with epiphanic revelation, particularly if one sees it as a displacement of myth; Mrs. Ramsey as Penelope in the opening chapters, weaving and weaving but destined not to finish. Or the great moment Taylor mentioned of Nancy at the tide pool, on page 75, which suggests a finer line between mortality and immortality, Gods and mortals than we are generally lead to believe exists. It illustrates that ultimately all we can do is strive to become Gods.

I also found this passage intriguing, in the first chapter of The Lighthouse section.

"And he shook his head at her and strode on("Alone", she heard him say, "Perished" she heard him say)and like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls. If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things. " (pg 147)

This brings to my mind associations with Kabbala, which is centered upon word magic and the divine, creative properties inherent in words(fitting, as this is Lily Briscoe the artist here, listening to Mr. Ramsey), and how the act of applying words,even bleak frightening words like "alone" and "perished" grants reality where there previously was none(the house was abandoned, after all, and left open to Time and Mrs. McNab). And in the fact of there being something as opposed to nothing, there is the reality and the impetus to live and to work--Lily decides to finish the abandoned painting.

I can't say that Virgina had intensive knowledge of Kabbala, but there is another place, sadly forgotten by me at this present time and moment(one of her letters or her diary maybe) where she says "Nothing has happened until it has been described." Which applies to this fittingly.

I read To the Lighthouse about three years ago. Perhaps it goes without saying, but there have been things that have popped out to me this time around, re-reading it, that I didn't catch the first time. One of these is the connection(if any) between the fairy tale and the rest of the Vision of Virginia(couldn't resist, sorry).

Mrs. Ramsey is reading The Fisherman's Wife to her little son James in chapter X of The Window section.

" ' And when he came to the sea, it was quite dark grey, and the water heaved up from below, and smelt putrid. Then he went and stood by it and said,

Flounder, flounder, in the sea,
Come I pray thee here to me;
For my wife, good Isabil,
Wills not as I'd have her will.

Well, what does she want then," said the Flounder.' And where were they now? Mrs. Ramsey wondered, reading and thinking, quite easily, both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody. And when would she be told?" (pg. 56)

I wonder if this can be construed as a reflection on the relation that story has for Real Life(whatever that is anyway), the bass gently accompanying the tune, and hence a part of the overall music of our existence. It isn't so much that the fairy tale relates in some sort of perfect microcosmic way into the rest of the story; though in a sense it does: the fisherman's wife wants everything that can possibly be had, and ends up ultimately with nothing. Mrs. Ramsey's epiphany on page 65 where she becomes one and the same with the lighthouse beam and "She felt, It is enough! It is enough!" Which is to say that, paradoxically, nothing is perhaps Everything after all, and vice-versa. That at any given moment you are in contact with everything you'd ever need or want to be. You just don't know it. And it is through the sharing of stories, from one age to another(ie. Mrs. Ramsey and James) that we can come a little bit closer to understanding this.

Or Kari could be off-base, which is also a possibility.

Our assignment for this week is to find five epiphanic moments in To the Lighthouse. I'll admit I've been excited to come to this, being that I am something of a Woolf-ophile. Not that I intend to raise expectations with this statement.

There is a point, talked about by Aldous Huxley in his 1945 book Perennial Philosophy, where all religons meet(perhaps despite themselves)and that is the mystical(this is also something that Huston Smith, a teacher of Mr. Sexson's, talked about to in his book Religions of the World). The mystical is the level at which To the Lighthouse, and indeed pretty much all Woolf, demands to be read. The mystical and the mythological(which are tied so very close together) are woven throughout the entire novel, which on the low-rung Literal level is so, dare we say, boring and mundane. For example, part 4 of the Time Passes section features time being interpreted in its eternal process by Mrs. McNabb, the ancient cleaning lady. It could almost be said that Mrs. McNabb is like Sibyll, from Greek Mythology. I was also interested to see the corallation with a Theodore Roethke poem about three cleaning ladies named Frau Baughman, Frau Schmidtz and Frau Schwartz, whom he metamorphosizes into the Three Fates. And also the personification of the night on page 142, and the idea of Mr. Ramsey as Cronos(devourer of his children).

I think I'm going to enjoy this.

Blast from the literary criticism past this morning. We trace how Northrup Frye's scale of reading levels ties in with Dante's(who Frye of course stole from). For Frye, the go in order from the highest to lowest thus:
1.Anagogic - monad
2.Mythical - archetypal
3. Moral -image
4. Literal - sign

This also ties in with Giambatisto Vico's Ages as well:
1. Gods
2. Heroes
3. Men
4.Chaos

Frye also lays out, in his dense and dry but perversely palatable The Anatomy of Criticism, literary symbols of the epiphany. They are the mountaintop, the tower, the lighthouse, and the ladder. All of which we can find in expected or unexpected places. All of this is important information because we are officially about to begin (re)reading To the Lighthouse , and we are required to read it on the level of anagogy and Gods, not of the literal. Because we have to have the experience and the meaning, not just the one.

It was apparently Jorge Luis Borges who said that there only two stories really, the crucifixion on Golgotha and the search for an island in the Mediterranean where magical things exist.

You can tell that Annie Dillard is a good writer because it doesn't seem like she is trying. Her style is so smooth, seemingly casual and unadorned that it seems as though no effort went into it at all. But of course this really means that a great deal of effort went into it; in the case of the essay on the total eclipse, it took her two years to sort through everything she went through, to recollect it, and to write it out. Because as she makes no small point about, it was an experience that might be classified as holy terror: "You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit. This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying speeds. "(pg. 100-101)

This could be the essence of the dark epiphany; the comprehension of the enormity and darkness of the universe, or God or the gods or whatever we choose to call it--that it what the universe perhaps is, and why it is so shattering to actually percieve, because to see it is to see our own essential selves, which are finite.

Dillard also hits on the way that life goes on. "The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, all eternity, and God. The mind's sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg."(pg. 99)

We perhaps have to "forget" things, or to let them go, especially experiences that lead you to the edge of the abyss, that are terrifying and awesome and, yes, sublime. Because if you didn't let go and move on to things like fried eggs, you wouldn't be able to function. Maybe the capacity for the mind to "forget" is in some respects a cosmic gift, which we frequently let down by, but which is necessary if we are to function and not struck eternally dumb and into stone.

We have all been given a very extra-curricular assingment: to be in Caspar Wyoming on August 21 2017 to witness the total solar eclipse of the sun, and see how are experience goes along with Annie Dillard's. I we haven't read her essay on the eclipse(which I shamefully have not yet), then we are to, and blog about it for Friday. We are also to read Helena of the Ten Thousand Lakes' blog and do her better one. I somehow doubt that this can be accomplished by me, but we shall see.

We also discussed the notion of recollection(ie. memory)and its importance. In Tintern Abbey for instance, shows that it isn't experiance but re-visiting experience that ultimately matters. This is something that Proust also conveys(although not with the comparative brevity of Wordsworth, himself fond of words), in a kind of secular mysticism. And both In Search of Lost Time and Tintern Abbey suggest that the Aesthetic Hero must be an awakener of recollection, in others as well as in himself/herself. This not an easy feat, but then this is why there are lamentably few Aesthetic Heroes.

Great many things covered today, as usual taken from the impressive array of blogs that have been done. Sam made an interesting link with Tintern Abbey and the Upanishads and the notions of atman(the self, in Hindu religous philosophy) and the brahman(God, which is really everything) and the idea that in fact the atman and brahman are one. We just don't realize it in this world. And this tied in with the discussion of Plato and how when we are born we are in fact fallen infinitely wise winged beings who simply have to remember all that we knew before(links with Gnosticism). And all of this is to be found in Wordsworth.

I also liked the discussion of the implications of the word "buckle"; simulatanously being able to come apart and come together and how it further illuminates The Windhover.

And we are to read about the Fisher King, and see how it ties in with The Kingfisher.

Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey is, quite unambiguously, concerned with the nature of memory and recollection; the poet has been to this view of the English country side and the Wye river* five years before, and has remembered it all this time; not in a staid philistine way ("Oh yeah I went to that place during the summer, now let's talk about cell phones."), but in a way as invests it with a tremendous living significance, a vision of what things really are:

"Nor less, I trust,/To them I may have owed another gift,/O aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,/In which the burden of the mystery ,/In which the affections gently lead us on,--/Until, the breath of this corporeal frame/And even the motion of our human blood/Almost suspended, we are laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul:/While with an eye made quiet by the power/Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,/We see into the life of things."

We see into the life of things. Is this not what the Aesthetic Hero strives to do? Is this then, for Wordsworth, what an epiphany is, when we see into the life of things? "Almost suspended, we are laid asleep/In body and become a living soul." This is almost like the Religous Epiphany, where one is struck down by the sheer sublimity of what is being beheld. This came to the poet with a view of Tintern Abbey, yet this sublime power, while transcendent, isn't explicitly aligned with a standard Christian notion of God. Calling Wordsworth's aesthetic a kind of animism seems a rather gross oversimplification, but perhaps on the direction to the right path. This path would lead of course to Tintern Abbey. Or to Hylite, or to the M or to any other place in this Beautiful World of Ours. Because it is these experiances that could help free us from distracting distraction and allow us to see into the life of things. Or Kari could be completely off-base, that is also possible.

We centered upon a recurring motif today: that of borrowing, or stealing if one wishes to be more blunt. Eliot stole the via negativa section of "East Coker" from St. John of the Cross, just as David Malouf in his most recent novel Ransom steals from The Dry Salvages in the opening sentance: "The sea has many voices." This is obviously a ubiquitous element within literature. But then again maybe it isn't "Stealing" so much as different definition.

In regard to Walter Pater's notion of the Aesthetic Hero, for instance, is he stealing from John Keats, with his notion of negative capability(the state where mysteries are no longer troublesome, but accepted by taking everything in)? And is Henry James stealing from both Pater and Keats by talking about the ideal person being "one on whom nothing is lost"? And is Wallace Stevens stealing from all of them by writing about a "figure of capable imagination"(from his poem Mrs. Alfred Uruguay)? Or are they all taking about the same thing, just in slightly different ways?

The thing is you need to use your brain to be an Aesthetic Hero, in order to see things the way that they ought to be perceived. Taylor and Kevin are both on the right road, if not already there, in their readings of Disillusionment at 10:00 and Gerard Manley Hopkins, respectively. I've gotta say I liked The Windhover well enough when I read it, but it took hearing it recited for the full impact of the words and the imagery to really hit home; you realize just how ecstatic it really is. As Kevin said, "I've never read anybody that uses so many exclaimation points before."

And I gotta say I did not know that Wreck of the Deutshland was Gerard Manley Hopkin's longest poem, or that their was a book of Wallace Stevens' poems for children. Learn something new everyday.

Today was the day of wowser blogs. I am very impressed by the lengths others in the class are going to; I actually am almost envious and in thrall to the anxiety of influence. Many of them centered upon Walter Pater, and his followers, who also include Gerard Manley Hopkins and Oscar Wilde, both of whom were students of his at Oxford.

Jennie Lynn blogged about Marcus Aurelius, whom she admires, in what was a wonderfully instructive digression from Walter Pater, who was also a fan of Marcus Aurelius( so it wasn't a 'distraction' after all).

Lisa little Legs wrote about her adoration for John Keats, which goes back to his notion of the Veil of Soul-making from Literary Criticism. And it also turns out that the Aesthetic Hero(discussed so eloquently by Pat in his blog) is engaged in the Veil of Soul-Making! Pater attempted to construct a novel with the Aesthetic Hero, Marius the Epicurean.

And Taylor's great blog about having her 101 writing students write about epiphanies, which theoretically would go completely over their heads. But we find amazing unexpected things when we are confronted with things that we don't "understand" or "get", as Taylor says she was when reading Pater. But she has come through in a rather resounding way.

In short, it has become evident that there are many figures of capable imagination(borrowing from Harold Bloom, who was borrowing from Wallace Stevens)in the class.

*I must correct a previous blog. The Henry James short story was called A Jolly Corner not as I originally thougth, The Wrong Corner. Huge difference. Or is there?

Walter Pater, as we have already discovered, was enormously influential to the aesthetic development of James Joyce, as well as Oscar Wilde and others who can be said to fall within the realm of aestheticism, or what is more commonly known as 'art for art's sake.'

Another one of his disciples was Virgina Woolf, another dedicated aesthetic. She recalls in her piece Old Bloomsbury(later anthlogized with others in a collection called Moments of Being, in itself a Pater-sounding title), coming back from parties she had to attend very early in the morning(she recalls this as a very confusing, unhappy time of her young adulthood): "It was long past midnight that I got into bed and sat reading a page or two of Marius the Epicvrean for which I had then a passion."(Moments of Being, pg 160) This was a novel of Pater's. In another interesting connection between them, Virgina was tutored in Classical literature by Clare Pater, Walter Pater's sister(small world I guess).

Here' the concluding sentances from Pater's The Renaissance:
" Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion--that it does not yield you this fruit of a quickened, mulitplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

Maybe I am seeing a connection in to vague a spot(but I don't think so), but I was reminded of the epiphany(one of many really) that occurs for Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse:
" She listened, but it was very still; cricket was over; the children were in their baths;there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting; she held the long-reddish brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment. She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call(she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain who's bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!"(pgs 64-65)

This all transpires in one brief moment, but the landscapes(of the bedroom, and of the ocean, one in the plane of vision before her, the other in her mind) are illumintated by light, the light from the lighthouse and also the light that comes with recognition, with epiphany. And the moment, just on its own and of its own, is enough. The moment with the highest quality, much like Pater suggested, but different all the same.

Class began with Mick explaining, at the behest of Mr. Sexson, the architecture for his term paper, a rewritting of the Four Quartets with the Mick stamp upon it. He will be assisted in this endeavor by Northrup Frye's Words with Power, a great book about different metaphors. I don't know about everybody else but I am thourougly intimidated now.

We are to blog about the following things(after reading them, of course):
Walter Pater
Hopkins' poems
Wordsworth--Tintern Abbey
Annie Dillard
Proust--the madeline pastry
St. John of the Cross, who wrote two important works in the history of Christian mysticism, Ascent to Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul. Which ties in ideally, the latter does, with what we discussed today: the dark epiphany. Bright epiphanies can only exist in relation to dark epiphanies, which fill us with fear and despair, and recognition of the fact that nothing matters, since we are all, in the words of Burnt Norton, "distracted from distraction by distraction." And it is when we cease being distracted by the thousands of things that distract us constantly, that we can possibly work toward something else; after kenosis(emptying out, which is a terrifying thing)then we can maybe begin to be filled up again.

Samuel Beckett was a major believer in emptying things down to their bare essential components, and this is why we percieve his work as being so dark and despairing and awful. Until we begin to read it properly. I guess.

Today was a day of patching in holes in The Four Quartets, or rather in our presentations of them. We got through about twelve lines of Burnt Norton, the rest of our time(whatever in the world that is really) was spent on digressions, which were of course illuminating in the extreme, as digressions tend to be.

Among them were the discussion of the lines by Heraklitus that open the poems, which translated into English from the Greek are "The way up is the way down." This is clearly reflected in The Dry Salvages, though I have to confess Willy Wonka sprung to my mind as well. Heraklitus, who was a pre-Socratic philosopher(one of the Ionians to be specific) who revealed in the notion of paradox and coined the phrase "You can't step in the same river twice." None of these were things that I really knew before.

We also have the notion of time and its poetic relation to place, so prominent for Eliot in these poems. This suggests that place is a potent artistic thing; you choose a place, like Burnt Norton or East Coker or Tintern Abbey, and let the place come to you, the past of it and also the future of it come into the "now" that you are there. Because what didn't happen matters more than what did happen, in some strange way. What might have been is always an imaginative possibility, as the movie Sliding Doors apparently is an example of(which actually sounds almost exactly like a movie directed by Krystof Kieslowski called Blind Chance), as well as the last quarter of Kazantzaki's The Last Temptation of Christ.

I also need to read the Henry James story The Wrong Corner and Saint John of the Cross

*and a final note for this blog. Perhaps I was wrong and over-heated describing Eliot as a "rabid" anti-semite, and in making the grave error of bringing biographical information into play with discussion of the poet's work. I could chaulk it up to the heat engendered by my dark epiphany or it could just as well be that I am an un-learned reader, as of yet or when will be. Just felt I should mention it.

The presenters for Little Gidding did an excellent job presenting their portion of the poem, with its terrible darkness, allusions to the war, Dante and the Bible for imagery of destruction and purification. The drawings of the old man and time and the dying and living rose were great, I thought, and I'm still marveling that it was an actual picture of an actual snake that Gossamer von Goss presented--metaphor and allegory can be viscerally real, it seems.

Which leads in uncomfortably with the thing which I feel I must talk about, the dark dove with the flickering tongue which alighted on my shoulder during the presentation, specifically when Derek tied the poem in with Schindler's List. The element of Little Gidding is fire, and the recurring trope is fire which destroys and devastates so that redemption can come; there can be no salvation or purification without destruction, the forest has to burn so that the trees can grow again.

The literal Greek meaning of holocaust is "purification by fire". So, might there be arguments that the Holocaust was cosmically essential for the flourishing of life? That the Third Reich served a part in the ultimately good functioning of God's cycle? That the incalculable suffering of this was and is justifiable? It has been argued by many figures in different veins throughout history(even somebody like Leibnitz could espouse something like this, since it goes into all these hoary issues of theodicy and the paradox of how God allows us to suffer because of love and all the rest of it). I don't think I can accept this. Perhaps I am also feeding into this reading by the un-erasable biographical knowledge that TS Eliot was a virulent anti-Semite(as to an even greater extant was his mentor Ezra Pound, one of the three heads on the ghost),and in all likelihood didn't view the Nazi genocide as a bad thing, if anything the reverse. Can I not let this color Little Gidding? I want very much for it not to, but at the same time I do not think it can be ignored.

I admit I wasn't expecting to experience a dark epiphany this morning, yet I have. I'm still reeling from the implications of what the dark dove with the flickering tongue brought to me.

I think I will return to the question of rivers and their signifigance that the last blog sort of left dangling(though I have to say that this entry may not do much more than 'dangle' itself).

Rivers are powerful and are a part of original creation, at least in the Bible, where there are four rivers that have a role in the geography of the garden of Eden, and we travel down them for journeys of various lengths and dangers(my own family floats on rivers in the summertime, which sometimes takes up to a whole day, or days depending on the trip). It may be for fun, or it may be of dire necessity, or it may simply be to go the way that one needs to go. Think of the importance of river journeys in, say The African Queen or Huckleberry Finn. Heck, even the Henry Mancini/Johnny Mercer song "Moon River" fits into this: "Moon river, wider than a mile/I'm crossin' you in style, someday."

And, since the river is the source of life, we can never know for certain were it can lead. For some reason I think of the line in Coleridge's Kublai Khan : "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree/Where Alph the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea." Is the sunless sea the end, Death? Or are we being taken back to where we were before, into Creation which was also dark before the light comes forth? Maybe this is what the first sentance in Finnegans Wake is getting at then: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Invirions."

Maybe I've just been going in circles around this issue, which is so incredibly fruitful and revealing. But I do think we can see that something is here. Even I can see that.

Today was the presentation by the Dry Salvages group, who continued on with the impressive Four Quartets dissertations. The element which this quartet is aligned with is water, like Burnt Norton was air and East Coker was earth. I was particularly struck by the distinction poetically made between rivers and the ocean: rivers are inside of us, the ocean is outside of us.

I also loved the parallel between the labyrinth(which always for only one through way, though it appears otherwise)and the river, which takes us down the path toward our destination, which if we are on the river of life, is Death. But this is alright, because if all rivers flow to the ocean, which is outside us but which we all come to eventually, than it is also the return to that which we came from originally anyway. I just now realized this as I was typing this blog, so if it isn't more cogently phrased this is why.

When Kari is more motivated and with a bit more time(but what is that anyway?), she may blog about the metaphorical and spiritual significance of rivers in literature.

The sharing of diamonds from The Dead continued today. It was also pointed out by Loomis(also according to Loomis) that there are five sections of the story.
1. Musicale
2.Dinner
3.Leave-taking
4.Drive to hotel
5.Vision
The last is of course the great moment to which everything had been building, and it is also where the still point is. Relating of course to the lines from Burnt Norton: "at the still point of the turning world, there the dance is."

It is also mentionable that Gabriel and Michael are of course the names of archangels, further pushing the contrast between the two in the story: Gabriel is so at pains to keep the elements at bay(such as with the galoshes and refusing to go outside), and Micheal Furey stood in the rain, literally meeting his death for the sake of showing Gretta he loved her.

And the connection between Michael Furey and the song that is sung, The Lass of Aughrim. It tells the story of a young woman who has been seduced, impregnated and abandoned, and who is standing outside of the man's house in the rain, with the dead baby in her arms. So Gretta's epiphany even has an element of connecting Michael Furey with the story in the song rather than just the song itself. This was something that it had not occured to me to consider until it was mentioned this morning.

Today was the day of sharing diamonds from The Dead in class. There are many to be had, even though it is undeniably styled like a mundane story, not something that we would see elsewhere in a big exciting world other than the one we live in(mundane actually is derived from mundo, the world). Because, according to Mr. Sexson, 95% of writing out there is aimed at lazy readers, who expect the story to do everything for them. Joyce needs you to be an active reader and pull the meat from the story out on your own(really Virginia Woolf is another writer who requires her readers to be active).

One learns things one wouldn't expect to. I did not catch the linking of the painting of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet with Michael Furey, or with Gabriel looking up at his wife on the stairs in ecstacsy from the music. But now I do. Guess I need to strive toward being a more active reader than.

"The Dead"Diamonds

I first read Dubliners about six years ago, because I thought it was required reading for a class(it turned out that the syllabus had changed and that it was no longer required, much to my ire). I didn't enjoy anything in it or the experiance of reading it(I had, and still do, a dislike for reading short story collections. I tend to be happier reading novels or a story entirely on its own and not as part of a collection). Except for the last four pages of The Dead. I remember being very startled at how something previously so distant and cold for me had suddenly become so beautiful and real. And I bemoaned that the whole thing couldn't have been like the last few pages, with that great, terribly painful revelation about Michael Furey and how we are all to die, and fall as the snow does outside of the window.

Really, one of the diamonds that we were instructed to locate I think foreshadows this directly: At dinner, Freddy Malins talking to Mr Browne about Mount Melleray, where he will be going shortly, and the monks that live there, who sleep in their own coffins. Mr Browne doesn't understand this at all--why would they do a thing like that? "Freddy Malins explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world...--The coffin, said Mary Jane, is to remind them of their last end."(pg. 201) This was an "oh" moment in a way that it wasn't when I first read it.

Same for the moment when Gabriel looks back and sees his wife Gretta on the stairway, listening to the music, terribly moved. "She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on a piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing." (pg. 209). Its a bit like The Wind in the Willows when Rat and Mole no longer remember and strain to hear the music, but cannot quite hear it. It's really terribly moving.

Today was a Joyce day, illuminated by a very good blog entry by Adam Benson about the term epicletie, which Joyce valued over "epiphany" in regards to Dubliners. Why? Because epicletie refers to the invocation to the Holy Ghost to sanctify the wafer and the wine for the ceremony of Eucharist. It also carries connotations of a court summons. Joyce aims to have the "oh" and "ah" moments in the Dubliners stories to have this quality of sanctification and of summons to right action.

This is really what Joyce strove to do; to have secular epiphanies for the modern world in which we live. Since we are no longer in the age where epiphanies were had everyday in the act of observing plants grow and the hunting of animals for food and these things were linked with divine significance. Hence why the Elysianian mysteries had something told, something seen and something shown, and how the something shown being a stalk of wheat(as far as guesstimation can have it)would've been a powerful epiphanic experience. Now in our secular context the important thing is ultimately telling, not showing. And this is why the stories in Dubliners seem insignificang: we aren't being told of their significance, we are being shown them.

However much Joyce appears to be Realistic or Naturalistic here, he is in fact a Symbolist, since every single word has meaning and operates in a very specific way. Such as the importance of the word "blind" at the beginning of Araby and how at the end, his eyes are burned and scorched with anguish. Ala Oedipus Rex.

A philosopher named Giambatisto Vico was very important to Joyce's aesthetics as well. Vico, who constructed an entire mythology around the importance of the clap of thunder, which he felt marked the turning point for human development. Perhaps not coincedentally, there are ten thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake, all onomatoepaically spelled out with one hundred letters.

We are to read The Dead for discussion on Friday. One of the things that it would probably behoove us to do is to consider how Joyce got from the stories in Dubliners(the style of which he described as characterized by "scrupulous meanness") to Finnegans Wake, which is may be scrupulous as well(but sure as hell doesn't seem like it)and might make an unsuspecting reader think that the writer is mean for having written gibberish to be deciphered. But how did it happen, and is there a difference really? And I have got to say that Jennie Lynn reciting the last few pages of Finnegans Wake was extraordinarily impressive, and that it was really rather beautiful. As though it becomes like music rather than words and you don't care if it makes sense anymore and just listen to how it sounds.

And I do have to say that I rather like that the motto for MSU comes from a poem of epiphanic despair(No Worst, There is None) written by a depressive Jesuit priest and lyric poet.

On Friday we we're forbidden to read Nick's blog, and I now know why: it would make the rest of us feel that it would be futile to write again, so completely complete is his definition of epiphany.We must also read Jennie Lynn's blog about chaos.

The predominant discussion of class today was the issue of forgetting: why does the great god of Nature have Rat and Mole forget that they saw him? Some in class have taken this to mean that Grahame thinks epiphanies should be forgotten and that this is wrong. The question than became, perhaps the emphasis really falls not on forgetting, but on remembering. And that the great epiphany isn't forgotten, but is around us all the time and we must seek to remember that it is there. Which ties in with anagnorisis , which is actually something that I had been wondering about, if it had a connection with epiphanies or not. Well, lo and behold Sam posted a quote from Northrup Frye from page 130 of Northrup Frye on Milton and Blake: "Epiphany is the theological equivalent of what in literature is called anagnorisis, or "recognition." This is what the Joycean epiphanies in Dubliners are like.

For those who have some exposure to Classical mythology will know, anagnorisis is frequently an extremely painful thing, such as when Oedipus realizes he killed his father and married his mother, or when Agave realizes its her son's head and not a lion's that she's bearing in her hands.
This perhaps ties in with a phrase that was brought up today: via negative, or the negative way, which means attempting to describe God by negation. Basically, everything falls short and is therefore horrible to some extant or another.

This is something that Dante was aware of, in his compositon of The Divine Comedy, where he witnesses all of these horrifing things before finally beholding a vision of a rose at the highest point in heaven. Clearly TS Eliot was heavily influenced by Dante, as the lotus clearly suggests.

I'll close this entry with mentioning a tiny epiphany I had yesterday afternoon while meeting with my group the Cokers. Douglas was talking about how the poem seemed to be written in different poetic voices, and then a little light bulb clicked on: different voices, the "they" in the poem. Because it is their voices! It was a nice bright winged brief moment.

We've been assigned to blog about our various epiphanies with literary texts. This, it ought to be said right off the git-go, will not be the final entry on this issue, for which I could post a great many entries. But today I am going to tell about my encounter with a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer called The Slave, one of my very favorite books of all time.

I first read it about three years ago, for Mr. Sexson's Biblical Foundations of Literature class. I picked it up on a Saturday morning, intending to just read a chapter or two at a time. I didn't move until I'd read the whole thing through, and when I looked up it was dark outside. It was a case, as they say, of not being able to put it down. Which doesn't happen to me terribly often, even with books I enjoy. For those who haven't read it, its a very wonderful, potent story of the relationship between Jews and Christians, and wondering of the cruelty of the world with the silence of God. And how, in spite of this, there are epiphanies(possibly even subtle theophonies, if such a thing is possible) to be had. One of the most stunning occurs near the end of part two, where our protagonist, Jacob, is fleeing those who would kill him with his infant child after having lost his Gentile wife in childbirth.

"Jacob remembered the words his namesake had spoken on his deathbed: 'And as for me, when I came from Padan, Rachel died by me in the land of Canaan in the way, when yet there was a little way to come to Ephrath; and I buried her there...' His name was Jacob also; he too had lost a beloved wife, the daughter of an idolater, among strangers; Sarah too was buried by the way and had left him a son. Like the Biblical Jacob, he was crossing the river, bearing only a staff, pursued by another Esau. Everything remained the same: the ancient love, the ancient grief. Perhaps four thousand years would again pass; somewhere, at another river, another Jacob would walk mourning another Rachel. Or who knew, perhaps it was always the same Jacob and the same Rachel . Well, but the Redemption has to come. All this can't last forever." pg. 278-279

This may seem obscure to those who are looking at this blog who haven't read the novel. But perhaps not. In a way, this is an epiphany; the understanding of a pattern, of a story, and that you are a part of it.

Our group meetings wisely took place at the beginning rather than the end of class(maybe this is just what we should do from now on); the Cokers are on their way to memorizing their divided up sections of the section--I am section 7, right near the end. Therefore I am not panicked about where all my lines are. And on the 20th of February we shall give a presentation of the content of "East Coker", much of which is addressed to the understood "they". Who are "they". It is very likely that "they" refer to the spirits of the dead(coincidence linking this to the Joyce story?), specifically from ancient times; the world in which they lived is now completely carpeted by modernity, but it may not be lost to you, if you listen close enough.

We listened to Van Morrison's rendition of the song "Piper at the Gates of Dawn", which was fun, even if the speakers were muddy.

I liked Abby's story of her "food epiphany" with eating the oxtail soup at the Cul-de-sac restaurant in Rome. Relates in a way to the petite madeline in Proust, and the food in Babette's Feast and Like Water for Chocolate.

This is one of the things that Eliot, in section three of the Four Quartets, categorizes as moments of happiness: frution, fulfillment, affection and a good dinner. But he also asserts that the epiphanic moment goes beyond "happiness" , touching upon notions of the Sublime, which is simultaneously beautiful and terrible, wonderful and painful.

And there is Taylor's defintion of epiphany--knowing what must be done, which ties into two words which will be important: right action.

Well, we're still approaching a definition of the epiphany: there's the Little Epiphany(which makes you go "oh!) and then there's the Big Epiphany(which makes you go AHA!). The movement of the Big Epiphany from the religous sense(seeing God come out of a whirlwind would kind of be a AHA! moment) to the secular sense is generally credited to James Joyce; the Joycean epiphany is where you read along and then suddenly have a "aha!" moment; his short stories in Dubliners are all built around this idea.

Virginia Woolf of course was also highly attuned to the notion of the Little Epiphany, as page 161 of To the Lighthouse explains; how there is no "Great Revelation", but instead "little daily miracles", "matches being struck in the dark."

But even the ancients weren't completely dissociated from the idea of epiphanies within the processes of life; at least as Karen Armstrong has it, with her comments upon ancient agriculture in A Brief History of Myth: " the crop was an epiphany, a revelation of divine energy." The processes of nature, therefore, can be in and of themselves, a facet of divine power.

It is our homework assignment to share our own Aha! moments with literature. It is the experiance that matters, not the telling, when it comes to epiphanies. So than perhaps the task becomes to have the telling be in fact an experiance, or at least as close as this is possible, and it may not be. I don't know. Or maybe this is what Wordsworth was getting at when he defined poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility".

I believe I left the previous blog off with the question of the difference, if any, between an epiphany and a theophany. I'm not sure I've come any closer to a concrete distinction, but I think something might be touched upon, which I will share with discussion of Wind in the Willows.

I re-read the chapter entitled "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" where the Mole and the Rat, searching late into the night for a missing baby otter named Portly, hear this unspeakably beautiful music(at first Mole doesn't hear, saying to Rat "I hear nothing myself but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers." pg.124). Following the music, they come upon the great god of nature playing his pan-pipes, with the baby otter asleep by his hooves. Rat and Mole are overwhelmed and so joyous that they can hardly bear it. But than dawn finally breaks, and the Vision is gone, and they don't remember what it was they saw.

"For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before." pg. 127

They don't remember seeing the great god of nature, but they still can hear the music, even after they've forgotten the encounter. I thought it was interesting how the line form the first section of "Burnt Norton"-- "In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,/And the bid called, in response to/The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,/And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses/Had the look of flowers that are looked at. "

So, really this episode is an example of a theophany, the revelation of a God to mortal beings, like that of Moses seeing the burning bush in chapter three of Exodus; Moses cannot bear to look at Yahweh, just as Job is sorely humbled and cowed by the display of cosmic force when God speaks to him out of the whirlwind in chapter 37 of Job. (I almost wonder if it is any accident that Grahame's great god of Nature is so much more benevolent; really the Yahweh in the Hebrew scriptures is a real bad-ass, which is something which I am sure we will discuss more of later).

So, perhaps the epiphany is what is left over from a theophany, both in the sense of we still hear the sacred music though we no longer know where it comes form, and the understanding that something has happened; there was a moment when I could See, rather than just see. Or I could be just skimming the surface.

Even from the day before yesterday, a great many blogs have already gone up and running intensely in a way that makes me green with envy due to their visual opulence and humor and pertinence.

Many center around the question of what an epiphany is. It derives in part from the Greek word phanos, meaning "seen". It is beginning to appear more and more that epiphanies require the act of seeing, such as Taylor's memory of seeing leaves for the first time after she got her glasses when she was eight. One says "I had a prophetic vision" after all. The word vision comes from the Sanskrit word vid, meaning "to see"(which is obviously where the term "video" comes from). And the important Hindu scriptures are called the Vedas, deriving from the Sanskrit vid as well. And in case it wasn't connected enough, the final word of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is "vision". Lily Briscoe the painter says "I've had my vision." At another point in time I will be blogging about my first encounter with To the Lighthouse, and by extension my first encounter with Virginia(on whom, it must be confessed, I have a raging intellectual crush), a writer perceptive to epiphanies if anyone was.

And this connection makes sense even more, since TS Eliot takes a great many points of influence from The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu religous text.

And the difference, which we doubtless will begin to explore, the difference(if any) between a theophony(seeing God) and an epiphany.

And I also need to read Theodore Roethke's The Far-field now.

The Beginning

Today was the first day of the capstone class on epiphanies, which promises to be wonderfully enlightening.

We broke into our groups already, which are organized around the four sections of TS Eliot's Four Quartets(which we must have on our persons at all times, such is the decree), and which the groups attention will be devoted to. The group I belong to is the Cokers--sounds very official to me for some reason.

The first text aside from Four Quartets that we are to read first is Wind in the Willows. More in-depth discussion of the epiphany and the nature of the beast will follow shortly.