Hemingway, Chingachgook, and Camus

I was just flipping through my notes when I saw The Myth of Sisyphus -Albert Camus.  I may not read all the books mentioned in Mythologies, but I try to look them all up and know at least a little bit about them, so I checked it out on Wikipedia.  The last lines of the essay appear to be “The struggle itself […] is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

This is an interesting coincidence–haha–because I recently turned one of my friends on to reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.  For anyone unfamiliar, the novella is about an old man who hasn’t caught a fish in months going on a fishing expedition, where he catches a giant beast of a fish.  After several days of little food or water while catching this thing, he ties it to the side of his boat and starts making his way back to shore, but sharks eat almost the entire thing before he gets home.

I always felt that the point of The Old Man and the Sea, if it were distilled into an oversimplified sentence, was that all your hard work and effort will come to nothing–but it’s worth it to struggle anyway.  The old man stays awake for days, becomes bloody from the boat’s ropes over his hands and back, starves himself, and when he comes back the tourists don’t even recognize what he accomplished.  He’s still broke and starving, living in a shack when he returns–and he starts coughing up blood.  A couple other fishermen, however, look at him with new-found respect, and he feels better about himself.

I didn’t connect the story with The Myth of Sisyphus until something jogged my memory in the middle of Monday’s class and I realized it could be a displacement of the myth, zoomed in a little.  Instead of seeing an eternity of unending struggle, like Sisyphus, The Old Man and the Sea focuses on just a few days in the old man’s life–a single fishing expedition.  Through that, however, we see that he has gone out fishing every day for the last eighty-four days without a catch, and has been fishing for a lifetime before that.  After getting home, empty handed, he is determined to go out fishing again the next day, completing the idea of unending struggle.

This was particularly interesting to me because I had always assumed that Sisyphus had to be a pretty sad guy all the time, while I had always thought of the old man as satisfied at the end.  The idea that Sisyphus could be satisfied with his lot, or experience any emotions other than frustration and sadness, really, had never crossed my mind until I connected it to The Old Man and the Sea.  Even before I read the ending of Albert Camus’ essay, the connection changed my interpretation of the myth.  This goes to show that the recent displacements of old myths are not just ripoffs, they can be just as enlightening to the myths as the myths are to the displacements.

The idea of everything coming to nothing, despite our struggles, and that not being an entirely bad or sad thing, also connected to the closing thought of the day: Belated–somebody was here before you.

I haven’t read James Fenimore Cooper’s famous The Last of the Mohicans, but the movie was pretty good–Michael Mann and Daniel Day Lewis!–and the ending always resonated with me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwgmTo49LQw

Chingachgook (the older guy)’s sentiments exactly echo the idea behind The Old Man and the Sea.  He sees that everything will eventually be worn away by a thousand thousand footsteps, but that doesn’t mean there is no point in doing anything.  All our actions will eventually be made into nothing–sharks will eat your fish, “our race will be no more, or it be not us”–but you can still take pride in the idea “…but once, we were here.”

Thus, though you will disappear and be forgotten, you can still be the precedent behind someone else’s action.

I think that’s as close to a summation of our Mythologies class as I’m going to get.

Francis Ford Acoppalypse

All our recent talk of Francis Ford Coppala and Apocalypse Now reminded me of Francis’, in my opinion, true masterpiece.  Apocalypse Now isn’t bad or anything, but it’s no The Godfather.  Hell, it’s no The Godfather part II.

That’s not to say Apocalypse Now isn’t a great film–it is–far better than most released.  I’ve just always felt it was a little heavy handed in some respects.  Using The Doors’ The End during its opening and closing, for example, is something I could have done without (not that I didn’t enjoy Thomas’ rendition as much as the next).  Its like when Watchmen used Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ during it’s montage of the 1960s–really, how long do you think it took the producers to thing of that pairing?  As much as a minute?

The Godfather, on the other hand, is brilliant, top to bottom.  While Apocalypse Now had high expectations (it was based on Heart of Darkness and featured Brando, how would it not be good?) and failed to meet them, The Godfather was widely expected to be terrible and instead blew everyone out of the water.  Part of this, I think, was due to its many displacements of Ovidian myths.

This was the blog post that got me thinking about The Godfather and its mythic origins.  As I thought about it some I realized it was probably enough material for my final paper, so here you go:

 

I have long felt that the modern education system should be overhauled and redone, destroyed and rebuilt. I think the first time I had this thought was in Algebra in 10th grade when I missed points on a test for leaving my answer as 100,000,000 instead of changing it to 10 to the 8th, or something along those lines.  I thought ‘why would I do that?  Scientific notation is for science class, not math,’ and immediately afterward I realized how strange the system had to be that it felt weird to simplify large numbers with scientific notation in my Algebra class.  I had a similarly jarring experience once in Biology when the teacher asked why some discoveries were all happening around the same time and no one connected it to the Renaissance (that was the province of History class).  These eye-opening occurences and their ilk convinced me fairly early that our entire system of education was too compartmentalized and failed to convey the true interconnectedness of the real world.  Outside the school’s walls people never deal with Math for an hour, then shelve it entirely to deal with English for an hour, and so on.  The real world is a spiderweb of relationships, each crossroads splintering into a myriad other connections.  Given that this was in the back of my mind before I started at MSU, I was not terribly surprised when talk of myths being all around us started coming into the classroom.  Even I was surprised, however, by the number of myths I started to see around me and their connection to today.

The first place I started looking for myths was in my old favorite movies, and it didn’t take long to see some displacements.  The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppala’s true masterpiece, has a number of myths wrapped in it.  The entire movie could be seen as a drawn out retelling of Ovid’s story of Phaethon and Helios.  In that myth Phaethon wishes to be like his father and drive the sun chariot across the sky, something his father tries to talk him out.  Helios is eventually unsuccessful in his attempt and Phaethon assumes his father’s role, to disasterous results. The Godfather begins with Michael Corleone assuring his girlfriend “that’s my father, Kay.  That’s not me,” but ends with him stepping fully into his father’s shoes as Kay looks on in horror.  Michael has not died, as Phaethon did, but he has been transformed into a monster by attempting to take his father’s role in the Family–something the father tried to prevent.  Vito Corleone (Michael’s father) sent Michael to college in an attempt to keep him from the family business and even tells Michael “I never wanted this for you,” but is finally unnable to keep him from being pulled in.

The Godfather also contains a loose rendition of Procne.  In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Procne kills her son to spite her husband Tereus after he rapes and mutilates her sister Philomela. The Godfather recasts the story as an early commentary on family and the right to choose (it predated Roe v Wade by a year) when Kay gets an abortion to stop any more of Michael’s children from entering the world, something she considers abominable.  Kay had no sister and there is no rape, but the boil-down in both cases is the same–the woman kills the child to spite the husband.

The myth of Eurydice is also wrapped up in Coppala’s masterpiece, though it has a significant twist, as do all the myths in The Godfather. In the original myth Orpheus descends into the underworld, attempting to bring his wife Eurydice back with him.  He succeeds in talking Hades into releasing her, on the condition that he not look back on her until they are both above ground again.  This myth is displaced in the film when Michael agrees to assassinate two enemies of the family, the corrupt police officer McClusky and the Tattaglia’s advisor Sollozzo.  He meets the two at a seedy diner, supposedly to negotiate the terms of a cease-fire.  After a bit of talk he excuses himself to the bathroom, where a gun has been hidden ahead of time for him (he couldn’t just bring one because McClusky and Sollozzo’s goons searched him before the meeting), and comes out blazing.  While the diner may not have been representative of the Underworld before the meeting, Michael has clearly transformed it into the Underworld by the time he leaves.  Clemenza’s word of advice to Michael before the meeting, to shoot them down and “never look back, just keep going, don’t look back at all” never stuck me as out of place before.  Now I realize they were a clue to the mythic origins of this amazing film.

Michael is not the only one of Vito’s sons to be surrounded by myth.  The oldest son, Sonny, represents the myth of Icarus.  According to myth, Icarus flew too close to the sun with borrowed wings and fell to his death when the heat melted the wax holding his feathers together.  It is fitting that someone named Sonny be the symbol of Icarus, who was done in by the sun.  In the retelling, Sonny is famous for his uncontrollable temper.  When he hears his sister has been beaten by her husband he becomes enraged and dashes off to deliver punishment without his bodyguards, but it is a trap and he is gunned down in a tollbooth.  Sonny, like Icarus, is unable to conform to the Greek idea of the Golden Mean, which leads to his downfall.  Icarus literally flies too high, a direct connection to the Golden Mean, which leads to a literal fall.  Sonny’s flight and fall are more metaphorical, but they are the same story.

Even Fredo, the ever-useless middle brother, is a mythological displacement.  He is a retelling of Narcissus.  Narcissus, according to Ovid, saw a reflection of himself and fell in love, eventually dying because he refused to move the poolside where he could see his own face.  In The Godfather Fredo is constantly obsessed with his own standing in the Family.  After Sonny dies and Vito starts thinking about passing down the reins he believes he is going to become the next Don, only to be passed over in favor of the youngest son, Michael.  He is unnable to make peace with this and remains filled with impotent rage towards Michael until his (Fredo’s) death.  Fredo is not a beautiful man like Narcissus and does not spend any time studying mirrors, but he fulfills the Narcissus role through his unending self-obsession, which leads to his death.  Fredo eventually dies in a boat, looking into the water like Narcissus, when he is shot as punishment for betraying Michael to raise his own standing.  His defense, when confronted?  “They said there was something in it for me!”

I am sure someone more well versed than myself in the many myths could find more displacements in The Godfather, but these were the ones that stuck out to me–and I haven’t watched the film in years.  The fact it is so densely packed with mythology that I, a mere novice, was able to think of five displacements from memory just goes to show how richly entwined our world is.  Myths truly do surround us, influencing our daily lives in ways we can only begin to comprehend.

Freedom and Fate

Frederick Turner said “freedom could almost be defined as knowledge of fate,” when he spoke with us on Friday, something I’ve been mulling over ever since.

I don’t like the idea of fate.  Like the existence of higher beings, it implies that I’m not in control of myself, an idea I’d rather not believe.  After all, if we don’t control our own lives, it makes our lives meaningless.  Someone dedicating their lives to painting a masterpiece, or winning a gold medal in something, or whatever, is only impressive because they could have given in to the temptation to be a couch potato instead, and didn’t.  If they aren’t the person responsible for making their own choices, what value do their choices hold?

Freedom, on the other hand, is fate’s antithesis.  It makes our lives, our every action, meaningful.  Our struggles are only relevant because of the fact we choose to endure them to accomplish something.  In the cases where our trials and tribulations come to us rather than us seeking them out, how we choose to respond to them becomes the relevant issue.

For example, we think of people that risk all sorts of terrible things happening to them, like Oskar Schindler or Harriet Tubman, as great people because they chose to stand up to their fears and the dangers to help other people.  If they did not choose their own actions, but were instead fated to them, their “choices” lose all meaning.  They become no better or worse than all their contemporaries that saw what was happening, could have done something, and didn’t.

Fate and freedom,then, seem like mutually exclusive concepts.  How then can they be so entwined?

I don’t get it.  The only way I could see freedom stemming from knowledge of fate is if we stopped struggling against our fate when we learned what it was, the way someone being dragged before a firing squad will (often) stop fighting and accept their fate at some point.

Only, if fate exists, we can’t actually choose to stop fighting and accept their fate, it is predetermined.

I remain perplexed.

The Fall

I thought the most interesting thing Frederick Turner shared when he came to speak with us in the classroom was the idea that we had to fall from a state of beasthood and innocence to knowledge.  This is a reversal of the normal thought, as we traditionally think of humans being higher than beasts in a social order of the world, and more intelligent.  One moves from elementary school to middle school to *high* school, for example, and from there to *higher* education, and colleges are frequently called places of *higher* learning.  We move up as we learn, not down, in traditional thought.

Turner’s view is more biblical, I believe.  While Eden is not normally thought of as being literally in heaven, it is figuratively there*.  As such, it makes sense to think of humanity literally falling from heaven to earth as we move from a state of innocence to a more learned state.  The learned state is the real world, where we are no longer protected from misery, pain, etc as we were “above” in Eden–but we are more knowledgeable for that pain.

According to modern mythology, however, we are not the only creatures to fall from heaven.  Before we came around, a couple angels and god had a little bit of a tiff.  The offenders were…shall we say…”asked to leave”?  When Lucifer and company are kicked out of Heaven, they also experienced quite a fall.  In some ways this was a more traditional fall, as they are normally depicted as having gotten too full of themselves and arrogant and were taken down a few pegs, but it also works with Turner’s ideas.  When Lucifer and co. fell from Heaven, they learned a great deal–the limits of God’s forgiveness, pain, etc, and if someone were to place the pursuit of knowledge above all other considerations it would be hard to argue this wasn’t good for them.

Are the rebellious angels, the ones that lost and were banished to hell, then, more knowledgeable than the “better” angels left behind in Heaven?

Now there’s some food for thought.

My favorite depiction of Satan, easily, is Al Pachino in The Devil’s Advocate

*Forgive me if I screw this up too badly–I’m an atheist and have never actually read the bible.  My knowledge in this area is a strange collaboration of memories stemming from old Simpsons episodes and what passages of Paradise Lost time has left unravaged.

The Origin of the Satyr

After today’s discussion of the Satyr I thought I’d share my favorite joke, which I had never realized before could be an origin story.

A guy is touring Europe, seeing the sights.  He sits in a Parisian cafe on the Left Bank, he takes a corny picture with the Leaning Tower, and he takes a boat ride through Venice.  He looks at where the Berlin Wall cut a world in two, sees the Colosseum, and the old bullfighting arenas of Spain.

After a several enjoyable weeks doing all this, he starts thinking about making his way back home to the States, and decides to circle north before jetting back across The Pond.  After seeing what he can of London, he makes we way to Ireland.  After kissing the Blarney Stone, however, he realizes there aren’t a lot of superfamous landmarks to see, so, since he’s pretty tired anyway, he decides to take it easy and just visit a real Irish pub while he can.

He wakes up early the next morning and, a little bit of travel later, he finds himself a dirty watering hole off the beaten, touristy path and goes in.  Its a dark room, with only a couple tables set up outside the main bar.  The bartender doesn’t bother to acknowledge him when he walks in, just keeps sweeping up the remains of the previous night’s tributes to Bacchus.  Through the dim morning light streaming through the stained windows he can just make out one other patron at the end of the bar.

“Hello,” he offers as he sits down next to the other fellow, an old man already half finished with his second drink despite the early hour.

The old man says nothing.

The tourist presses on: “I’m visiting all the big landmarks while on vacation–do you know anywhere exciting I should make sure to visit while I’m here?”

The old man says nothing.

“I already saw the Stone.”

Still nothing from the old man, not even a glance in his direction, but the tourist is persistent.

“I bet this is a famous bar, eh?  What was the name of it again?  Or…you?  I bet you’re well known around here, aren’t you?”

The bartender snorts from across the room, drawing an irritated glance from the old man.

“You were probably Joe the Warrior or Mick the Brave or something like that in your day, weren’t you?” asks the tourist, almost ready to give up and go somewhere else.

Finally, however, the old man drains his glass and looks over at the tourist, saying in a thick accent, “You want to know my name, do you, laddie?”

“Yeah, what do they call you?” asks the tourist.

Again the bartender stifles a laugh from the other side of the room.  The old man ignores it this time, and starts telling his story.

“You see this bar?  I build this bar with my bare hands, by myself.  I felled the trees, I chopped ’em up, I sanded them down…best built damn bar north of Africa, this bar.  But do they call me Billy the Bar Builder?”

“I don’t–” starts the tourist.

“NO!  THEY DON’T!” yells the old man.  He continues, pointing out the window: “You see that dock?  I built that dock by myself, with my own two bare hands. I axed the timber, I nailed the boards, I measured the depths–and that dock will be here when you’re dust in a box, believe that laddie.  But do they call me Billy the Dock Builder?”

The tourist starts stammering out a response, but is cut off again.

“NO!  THEY DON’T!” the old man screams.  Then, walking to the door, he throws it open and gestures at a stone church across the street from the bar.  “D’ya see that church?  I built that church with my bare hands, built it meself.  I worked in the quarry for days on end.  I cut the stone, and I hauled it into place by the sweat of my brow.  That church will last a hun’red, hun’red, hun’red year, I say!”

“I’m guessing they don’t call you Billy the Church Builder either,” says the tourist with a smile.

“NO!” yells the old man again.  “THEY DON’T!…BUT YOU $&%# JUST ONE GOAT…”

 

 

Displacement Story

The last time I saw Richard was in Detroit, back in 1968.  After a long week in Fargo for work I had returned to our apartment in Detroit to find it was, again, his.

“Christ, Richard,” I had started when he buzzed me into the dull brick building.  “I know the neighbors better than you do.  The Super gave me a parking spot.  Can I have my keys work for more than a month?”

“I’m sorry,” was all would say.  “I ordered you another set yesterday.”

I calmed down as I put the groceries I had picked up away.  He was sorry, I knew, but that didn’t make me feel any better about being left outside again.  I pretended not to notice him standing near me as I kept my face in the fridge, rustling the packages in case he wanted to apologize again–if he wanted to build a wall between us I would show what I knew of bricklaying.

“How’s your project coming?” I called from the bedroom later, when I was feeling more forgiving.  “Get that roof finished?”

“The angles don’t want to come together the way I want,” he responded from the kitchen, where he was preparing our dinner.  “The rounded bits and the square bottom are just…oil and water.”

He picked up the frying pan and gave it a half-hearted shake as I joined him, loosely turning the chicken, then turned his back to look at the mess of papers on the kitchen table.  He bit his lip as if weighing speaking again, then turned to stare sightlessly out the small window on the parking lot below.

“It’ll never be finished.  I’m just going to keep wrecking it and wasting ink the rest of the night, get on my plane empty handed, and then give them a rectangle I doodle in the waiting room instead.”

Setting down my wine I walked over to him, circling my arms around his waist and letting my head rest between his shoulder blades.  “What about the Ferthety Building?” I asked.  “That was great–I bet this one will be even better.”

He pulled away and turned to face me.  “You’re such a romantic.  The Ferthety Building is an eyesore; I don’t even want to include it in my portfolio.”

“People love it!”

“People tell you they love it,” he corrected.  “Everything isn’t ‘happily ever after’ in real life all the time, Angela.  Your eyes are full of…you’re hopeless.  A romantic.”

I stepped back, hurt.  I slid back to my seat at the table and finished my wine as I looked at his sketches.  They were littered inches deep, completely covering the table.

“You’re wrong, Ricky.  Look at all this…you’re going to design a great roof for this behemoth.”  He just stared at me, noiselessly, so I continued:  “This is a high profile thing, right?  So you’re going to nail it, and it’s going to be great, and, and, and your career is finally going to take off!  You’ll fly above all the other amateurs, higher than your beautiful buildings–”

“That’s not going to happen, Angie!”  he interjected, slamming his hands down with a bang on the counter.  The chicken, long since forgotten, slid to the ground in its pan.

“You’re a romantic too, Richard.”

He picked up the pan and set it in the sink, then turned on the faucet.  The flames disappeared in an explosion of steam, flying skyward until it dissipated in a collision with the ceiling.

“You’re just romanticizing pain now, instead of possibilities and ‘happily ever after.’  You think being depressed all the time makes you deep and interesting?  You’re idealizing a lonely, misunderstood existence–you want to be The Starving Artist, Unappreciated in His Time.”

He didn’t move from the sink, he just looked at the slowly cooling pan.  Eventually he toweled off his hands and shoved them deep into his jeans pockets.  He said “you’re living in a dreamworld,” quietly, addressing the dirty dishes.

He brushed past me to grab his jacket, a brown leather bomber I had given him close to a decade ago.  It had been patched before and needed to be again, and the inside lining was starting to rip out, but he wouldn’t let me get him another.  Pulling it over his slender frame, he brushed past me again and walked out the door.

After uncorking another bottle of wine I watched him hail a taxi from our kitchen window, running out into the street, nearly getting hit by another taxi when he slipped on the ice and stumbled to the ground.

The Spinners of Babel

The most interesting thing to me about Diego Valazquez’s Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) is the ladder behind Athena.  It looks like it is at a bit of an angle and would cause anyone trying to climb it to fall, and doesn’t seem to belong.  There is no loft visible, no high shelves.  There are no second-level windows that would need to be opened and closed.

So why do they need a ladder?

My guess is it is a reference to the Tower of Babel.

The Tower of Babel is a story about humans trying to build a tower to reach from the earth up to heaven, allowing them all to circumvent the pearly gates and waltz into heaven, thus making god look like a clown.  God didn’t like the idea of looking like a clown, so he made everyone speak different languages as punishment (everyone spoke one language before this, as the story goes) and otherwise flummoxed their efforts.

The boil-down is that people were acting arrogant and (surprise!) got punished, just as in the story of Arachne.

Truth

 

In his defense, pants are pretty disturbing:

Popularity

The three most popular initiation myths, by a mile, were the Land Diving, the Ant Glove, and the Crocodile Bumps.  I was absent on Monday, so I can only imagine it was an exceedingly repetitive class–on the days I was present, Wednesday and Friday, there were no presentations on the Crocodile Bumps, and only a few overlaps on the other two.  Thus, Monday was probably nothing but Crocodile Bump presentations on repeat.

I think these three presentations were the most popular in class for one simple reason, which hints at more: Google.  A Google search for “initiation rites” yields a first response to Wikipedia, which has very little in the way of concrete examples anyone could use for a presentation, and a second result billing itself as the Ten Most Painful Initiation Rites, which contains all three winners of our popularity poll.

The question then is not why did everyone do something from this page, but why did everyone choose one of these three from the ten options given?  They were not the first three on the list, nor the top three, so there was clearly something special that set these three rituals apart from the rest.

I think it is human nature to peer into the abyss.  Leaving aside questions of whether the abyss gazes back, we want to look over the edge of cliffs and see the unknown, the dangerous–so long as we remain safely separated.

All three of these seem completely foreign and enticingly dangerous/painful to most people of our background, and that both fascinates and terrifies us.  Like a car crash, the idea of jumping off a high structure or deliberately scarring ourselves or inflicting pain captures our attention and imagination.

The Magus

“Whatever is past possesses the present” was the quote, given Friday, from The Magus.  The Magus was a book published in 1966, about a guy on an island being drawn into psychological games, growing more and more elaborate, to the point of not being able to tell what is real and what is “the game.”  While I haven’t read it, I’m slightly familiar with it, as I read a bit about it after seeing a movie loosely based on it called The Game.

The Game was a fantastic movie, starring Sean Penn and Michael Douglas, about a company that puts on extremely elaborate acts for people involving everyone in their lives.  Michael Douglas finds himself drawn into a game and unable to determine what is reality and what is part of the game after he signs up, which isn’t much of a problem at first, but things start escalating quickly.  He is chased by gunmen, nearly drowned in a locked car, and all kinds of other bad shenanigans as his paranoia starts seeming less and less unreasonable.

The point of the game is to eventually get people to reevaluate their lives.  Michael Douglas was a Wall Street type who spent almost zero time with his family and valued his money and possessions over everything, and the paranoia induced by his version of the game, and the pain he felt as he thought he was losing the people around him, taught him to place more value on them in the future.  If he had been a better person in the beginning his game would have been different–his past determined his present.

I think it is interesting to see how often the old tales are reinvented and redone as “new” stories, and in particular, how the reinventions are sometimes called original and sometimes deemed ripoffs.  The Game was an excellent movie with what I thought was a completely original storyline, until I watched it with my mom and she said it reminded her of The Magus.  If I had been exposed to The Magus first, would I have enjoyed The Game any less when I first watched it?

Would my mom have enjoyed The Game more if she was familiar with whatever The Magus ripped off, and recognized nothing is original?