Nap Time

I took a nap in Leigh Lounge today, easily my favorite place on campus, and had an interesting, although abbreviated, dream. I had awoken, suspecting my treasonous phone of missing its set time to alarm me, and I soon dozed off again, realizing I still had a whole three minutes to sleep. In these three minutes I dove into blackness, but not the blackness experience while not dreaming, but a blackness of anticipation, like the uncertain darkness before opening your eyes when you know someone is staring at you. Very eerie indeed. This black anticipation grew and grew until finally, in my dream, I opened my eyes to see a man wielding a hammer high above a rock. Staring straight at me, he brought the hammer down with a crashing blow, crushing the rock and jolting my body into a violent convulsion, which led to my awakening. Sparks flying from the rock became the lights hanging from the ceiling of the Leigh Lounge. My eyes seemingly open to reality this time, I realized my treasonous phone had indeed neglected to alarm me, and I set off for class, which was cancelled (something I daydream about on a regular basis...except for emergent lit., that is).

BeginningEndBeginningEnd

To arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time. We started in the womb, correct? Will death be like the womb? We do not recall the beginning, at least I don't; churning in warmth and darkness, relying entirely on another, although we have no inkling to who that other is. So when we die, what if we churn in eternal darkness, warm, alone, concious, but unable to percieve? The end will be the beginning, the beginning of another end, if one beleives in reincarnation, thus perpetuating recurrence.

The Alche...mist sorry I dozed off

I finally finished the book...finally. I found every page, as someone said in class, (sorry I can't remember exactly who it was, it may have been Christina and her book throwing) to be a repetetive beating of my head against an impenetrable wall constructed of bricks made of Personal Legends and mortar of Soul of the World. The very phrases made me shudder each time they were iterated, which incidently was e.v.e.r.y. page. I am not snobbish and I have never considered myself of the "highbrow" faction, but wow, how many times must we hear about the same damn thing? I suppose this business about relearning to read is important, but this "moral of the story" thing, made so painfully obvious in The Alchemist, is tiresome. I felt like I was reading children's literature with an ending that teaches an important moralistic life lesson, like "we must share with others". Instead, it was "we must follow our Personal Legends and fulfill what is meant for us in life". Contrived is the word I'm looking for, and possibly cheesy. I must say, though, there is no more obvious way to address the subject of Dolce Domum.

What is the Matrix?

The Matrix, in my estimation, is every story we have ever read, every dream we have woken up from with a strong, realistic emotion, every dream we have woken up from(or perhaps stayed in), period, for that matter, every time we have forgotten to remember that a story is not reality, and every time we have forgotten to ask "What is reality?". Also, and importantly, the Matrix is in the realm of our mind. The stories becoming true in our hopeful brains, our eager minds clinging to untruths, relating to them, making them real to us. We choose to believe them, even though they are called stories, and when asked to forget the absolution of their reality, we choose to relate to them, which is another, more obscure, form of reality. To escape the Matrix we "...must go by the way wherein there is no ecstacy./ In order to arrive at what you do not know/ You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance./ In order to possess what you do not possess/ You must go by the way of dispossession./ In order to arrive at what you are not/ You must go through the way in which you are not./ And what you do not know is the only thing you know/ And what you own is what you do not own/ And where you are is where you are not." (EC 139-146)

Next, dreamland. Have you ever awoken lividly angry with someone? I have. Christi (pseudonyms are a necessity in touchy situations) was a girl in my class in highschool, a girl who didn't exactly see things the same way I did. In short, we weren't the best of friends. In my dream we engaged in a full-blown fist fight, ending in seriously hurt feelings and maybe some bruises and cuts. She had said some things to me that cut to the quick and I woke up ready to fight, once again. All day at school, due to my disgruntled subconcious, I found myself fiercely angry about the things she had said to me in my dream. Some part of my mind had chosen to accept the dream as reality, triggering emotions originally derived from a simulated fight. I never capitalized on my latent anger, but believe me, my brain told me to consider otherwise. This emotion I felt during the day, after I had supposedly "woken up" made me think I was still in a state of dream. Had I really woken up? Does anyone ever wake up from their dream or is the dream the reality and the supposed reality the dream? How could one part of my mind be angry when I was telling it not to be, not to dwell on a dream? This enigma that is my mind defies me, much to my frustration. As for the Matrix, it is entirely in the mind, which is a scary place to venture endlessly, but is also a place we venture endlessly with no choice otherwise. Although our bodies move and we simulate the motions of everday life, isn't our mind where we truly "are"? Locate yourself and say "I am on the couch", but also consider the couch's reality without the faculties of the mind.

"Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders" Friedrich Nietzsche. When a person forgets to remember that a story is a fabrication, not the stuff reality is made of, they are vaulted into a dreamworld where the words on paper become tied to emotions, which become tied to ecstacy. In relating the world of words to the world of their reality, a person becomes ecstatic, unable to decipher between the simulation on the page and their actual life. They also forget to remember to ask "What is reality?". Even though the words on the page aren't reality in the common definition of such, are our lives reality, or are they simulations created by our minds to occupy our existence? Maybe in our minds is the only reality, making dreams, days, nights, foggy mornings, cold metal, smelly garbage, de ja vu, basically any one thing percieved by human senses, reality. Perhaps, when our mind tells us a story is real, and we watch the story unfold, watch the characters come to life, it is our reality projecting onto the story. After all, doesn't a person place themselves in the situations of the characters and let themselves be lost in the plots, emotions, and twistings of the reality of the story?

Stranger Than Fiction

The title of this movie intrigues me especially. It implies that fiction, the telling of lives of fabricated characters, is indeed a very strange custom. I definitely agree with this. As if our lives aren't strange enough, let's create characters, somewhat molded after ourselves, and puppet them through a series of everyday motions, focusing on their little quirks and oddities. I will allow that not every work of fiction does exactly this, but for the most part, fictional characters are just as common (or uncommon) as you and I, especially when they're alone, practicing their own routines, in their own little worlds. Now, when you take a character such as Harold Crick, and show him in his own little step-counting, brush-stroke-innumerating, (I can't repeat a verb, thanks to my high school English teacher) world, and then jerk him out of it, creating an entirely new conciousness for him, that is when the strangeness of fiction is exceeded. By creating a fictional movie about a non-fiction, fictional character, the author of this movie, the true puppetteer, lends a new meaning to life as ficiton and language. Maybe we're all walking around, assuming our identities are truly ours, when really the language of others is driving our existence. Maybe someday a character will enter our lives solely to end that very existence we strive so hard to maintain. Or, if our narrator is kind, we will live to a comforatable old age, self-assured in our wisdom and disdainful of rabble such as that I am dictating at this very moment.

As Beckett would say "Conspicuousness is the ABC of my profession." As a narrator, Beckett is completely conspicuous in his ABCs of storytelling. Jane, the narrator of Harold Crick's life, becomes conspicuous when her voice is suddenly made manifest to her character. Her intent towards a fictional novel, one where she kills her character in a climactic fashion, bringing the book to a perfect end, is suddenly changed from simple language to a concious choice. This choice is whether she should take a human life for the sake of a perfect novel, or whether she should spare this life, risking her idea of an ideal ending. Harold's life is controlled by the language his author chooses to use. His entire existence is a fabrication wrought from the twisted workings of anothers mind. Yet, he conciously chooses to adhere to this fiction and language when he hurls himself in front of the bus, in order to facilitate the perfect ending. Not only is his life leading up to the point of Jane's voice becoming manifest controlled by language, he lets his life after be controlled by the very language meant to kill him.

Also, as a quick note, Malone hears his own narrator throughout the novel Molloy. "And the voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard. For it is within me and exhorts me to continue to the end the faithful servant I have always been, of a cause that is not mine, and patiently fill in all its bitterness my calamitous part, as it was my will, when I had a will, that others should...Yes, it is rather an ambiguous voice and not always easy to follow, in its reasonings and decrees...And I feel I shall follow it from this day forth, no matter what it commands." (Molloy 126) This connection between Samuel Beckett's three novels and Stranger Than Fiction coincides with the idea of life as fiction and language. Both characters being controlled by voices vociferating commands, they share a likeness in situation as well as conciousness. They have their own conciousness, deciding to listen to the voice, but they also portray the conciousness of their author.