Last Thoughts on Sexon and the Course.

The course and Professor Sexon were both beyond superb in their performance this year. It was great. I was challenged to think in new ways, allowed to strut and fret my stuff upon the stage, and most importantly I had fun. But march away. Mythologies was great, there is no more to say.

Bacchus and the Furies: A Love Story

This isn't actually a love story; that was a joke. It's more like a personal confession. I have ever since I was fourteen, always been a huge fan of Dionysus. Ben Franklin said that beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy. Actually most religions (those which abstain from intoxicants aside) think that booze is a gift from god. In many ways I agree with them. I remember one occasion where myself and my best friend snuck out of my house at night, into his house, drank a bunch of his parents' liquor, then proceeded to sit in the room immediately next to their bedroom and loudly toast Dionysus' health. His parents never woke up, and though mine chided me when i got home, nothing came of it. Bacchus looks after his own like that. I go about the world as a satyr, kin to the piper at the gates of dawn, and spread inebriation in my wake. When you need a friend to drink with Bacchus is there, and I will be too if you're buying. Also I'm good to women. Prolly not always as much as I should be, but that applies to men as well. I'm not exactly their patron saint, but someday I will be.

The other side of me is the Furies. I seek revenge. Constantly. There is no wrong done against me which I do not repay in kind or footnote for later. I never forgive nor forget, but I have an immense tolerance for trespasses against me. I simply accept when people have wronged me, and move past it. I can do this for a long time, but if too much distaste is stacked up I stop turning a blind eye, and my tolerance is turned into an equal portion of hatred. Then I get revenge. I am the kindly ones most of the time, but once someone has gone so far that they can no longer be tolerated I drop the new, false name and go by my maiden name, the Furies.

That was kind of a dark post. I didn't mean for it to get so dark, but it did and it's the truth so I will leave what I have written.

Velazquez and Arachne

The first thing to say about this painting is that I already know about it. The reason for this is twofold. The first half of it comes from Ovid, who says that we already know everything and only relearn things. The second is that the painter is obviously me in a former life. My full name is Thomas Velazquez Herring. Velazquez was my maternal grandfather's name. He was from Puerto Rico. The fact that both the painter and I spell our names Velazquez is actually interesting; most people with that name spell is Velasquez. This is wrong, and also suggests a different ethnic background than mine. Obviously the world-renowned painter Diego Velazquez is one of my distant forbears who has through genetic metamorphoses found his way into my person. This is how I know the painting before ever seeing it or hearing about it.

 My problem here is that I honestly suck at deconstructing art that is not literature. I know nothing of perspective or shading or traditional symbolism. I do like the tale of Arachne and Athena though. Basically it is just another example of a god being jealous of a mortal and turning them into something horrible. For a discussion of why she does this see my blog entitled "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People According to Ovid and Myself." Something about the image which I really appreciated is the revisionist history therein. For some reason people are incapable of drawing or painting scenes about anything other than themselves. In the painting none of the women are wearing togas, but rather 17th century housewife clothes. Similarly the spinning wheels they are working on seem to be more modern than the Greeks would have had too, but I am less sure on that point. Furthermore I am disappointed because in the Eye Spy of Rennaisance art I am unable to find a post transformation Arachne. It seems to me that there should be a very obvious spider crawling around somewhere on the canvas and I can't find it for the life of me.

Why Bad Things Happen to Good People According to Ovid and Myself

Tradition Mostly.

My Personal Initiation

So me and the boys were sittin around the campfire when crazy ass Abram comes runnin up. "So guys listen up I just talked to god," he says. So I says "So what? Youz always talkin to god." Then he says "So shut up, this time its's important." He says "So like I said I was talkin to god and I said 'Hey god, why come I got no children?' and god says 'Is it by your will that the eagle soars on high? So shut up, I'm tryin to help you here,' so I says 'what..' and He says 'So shut up,' again 'I'm gonna cut you a deal here: so you're pissed you got no kids, so what, you see those starts in the sky. The ones I made for your dumb ass to look at? That's how many kids you're gonna have.'" Then I say "Thanks goddy, thats pretty swell of you!" and He says "Yeah yeah yeah, it ain't free. So here's what you're gonna do for me."

So no shit, here I am, standin in the middle of the freekin destert, with a one hundred year old man breathing down the back of my shirt, with a six inch knife sittin on my schlong. But you know me, I can't complain.

Absolute Truth: The Case is Closed

If you believe Ovid when he discusses the nature of learning it is pretty clear that I didn’t learn a single new thing in this class. I already knew everything we learned (everything in the universe actually) before I walked in the door on day two; I just characteristically forgot it and had to be reminded of what happened. Personally though, I don’t buy that. Ovid also says at the beginning of his super-compilation of Greek mythology that the truth about where everything came from is beyond him, but that this is unimportant for the purposes of his discussion. That I buy. The truth is that no one knows where we came from or why we are as we are, and honestly most of us do not learn anything while the powers that be refit our cradles for casket purposes. Anyone who says they know the truth (including Sexon, Ovid and Myself) is a lier.

Before we go on, I need to make one thing clear: I have no problem with lies. In fact I think that lies are among the best things you can tell someone! Every good joke or story is a lie. Lies are the best ways to try to get at the elusive Truth, which for some reason most of us (myself included) believe is out there. Kurt Vonnegut said “Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. So be it.” Obviously Ovid was reborn into Kurt Vonnegut through the process of metamorphosis, and this is true.

My point is that to get any sort of meaning out of Ovid you have to know two things at once: what he is saying is total b.s. and what he is saying is no less true than anything else. Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells us how Hades stole Persephone and how he mother grieves her absence for six (or in Montana 8-10) months and that is why we have winter. Modern science say we have winter because for half the year our location on the earth is tilted away from the sun. The latter argument sounds more logical until you ask “why?” If you ask why enough times (why is the earth at an angle, why did it form far enough away from the sun for life to exist, why was there a cloud of dense matter which formed our solar system, why was the Big Bang) the answer everyone will eventually have to fall back on is Ovid’s original statement: “Well I guess I don’t know.” The truth which every Ovidian tale tries to get at can be just as easily explained by modern science. We can tell where laurel trees came from, check dopamine and serotonin receptors to chart which gender enjoys sex more, and watch decomposing bulls to see if they generate bees. The problem is that while Science explains things very attractively and succinctly, it is repeatedly proven wrong. In explaining anything we are bound to be wrong because the “True” explanation is invariably more complex than we are able to understand, so the best thing that science and myth can hope to do is get their observations right.

In class we defined myth as the precedent behind every action. Really, if you use this definition, the reason mythology is seen as mystical and fantastic is obvious. We have no idea whatsoever why we do anything we do, we just do it. We don’t honestly understand why it is that young men disobey their fathers’ thoughtful advice, we do not know why young women run from men that love them, we do not know why we cut up our children and feed them to our husbands; these are just things we do. Everyone from Ovid to Freud has tried to explain these things, and no one has as of yet gotten a solid and provable answer.

Up to now it might seem like I am basically using this essay as a way to bash on Ovid, but 
that isn’t it. My point, my thesis, is that nothing anyone has ever said is more or less true than 
anything else, so it doesn’t matter which bit of nonsense you choose to believe. Being alive is 
to be standing alone in the dark. This is not a good way to be, so as humans we have to manufacture some type of light for ourselves. We have to believe in something, so why not Ovid, or the Bible, or Schroedinger’s cat? As a detective I learned that we are all victims of an unknown crime with no guilty party or motive. I also learned that you cannot bring this analysis of the situation back to your client, so you have to make something up. Here is what my mythic detectivework turned up:  God created the world in seven days in the study, but it was evil so Jupiter flooded it with the lead pipe, and that is why you can never know if the cat is alive or dead in the box with the revolver, and that is the Truth.

Caribbean Daphne

Ha! For some reason my blogger account wouldn't let me upload pictures for a while. I told it what was what and apparently it listened. Anyway, this is me hugging me Avocado tree. Actually it's my sister's avocado tree, but she goes to school in California, and if you take your plants there they burn them. So the tree is with me. I'm not really sure how this tree relates to Daphne. I guess I just think someone should give her a hug and say "Hey, it's okay that you aren't a lady anymore; I think trees are neat." It provides me with oxygen, and it is my friend, and I'm glad Apollo creeped on her because now I have this tree! It's not laurel, but I'm sure something similar to Apollo and Daphne happened in the Carribbean where avocados come from sometime, so it prolly fits.

Every Day is an Ordinary Day

In class we talked about how everything has been done before. Being original means going back to the origins. If myth is the precedent behind every action, and every action already has a myth, then for any and everything that can happen in a day there is already a precedent. The precedent might just be one instance of someone having the same day as you, but chances are that this is not the case. If everyone in class relates to myths in Ovid, and Ovid is just retelling Greek stories, it implies that the experience which characterizes your day was already so common by the original oral creation of the myth that everyone could already identify with it. Several thousand years have passed since then, so by my estimates any day a person could have has already been experienced more than several times by others before him. While a certain day may seem out of the ordinary within the context of our own lives, that day has probably happened countless times before. If you look at it this way it seems pretty normal that one's son died trying to crash-land an experimental jet which hit a flock of geese. That sort of thing has been happening since before people knew how to write.

the wolf in the swamp

I play a video game called halo 4. The premise is that in the future I get to be a superhuman with an awesome (and I mean that word literally) space suit, and am on a sacred mission to kill everyone on the enemy team (who are enemies because their space suits are a different color than mine) with super-advanced weaponry until you have killed the constantly respawning enemies enough times, at which point you win. I recently did not pull of the final part of this plan, and therefore defeated the purpose of the game. Do not worry though, dear reader, for there is a perfectly reasonable and mythological explanation for this anomaly.

The first thing that went wrong is that the area in which I was assigned to kill my enemies is called Abandon. The name is apt; it is a broken down military base which has been abandoned. The really damning thing about the place though is that it is in a swamp. In a way you get the feeling that somehow the swamp actually caused the abandonment. The second thing that went wrong was that a dude on the opposing team was named Lycaon1357. I don't actually remember the numbers, but they no doubt played some part in the mythological conspiracy to throw off my game. The point is that this gamer was a wolf. Maybe the wolf. He pwned me like a newb. Every time I popped out from around a corner he would be crouching there and kill me. He would jump off the roof firing down at me, he would run at me across an open plain, and every time I would die. I realized afterwards what had happened: by some strange twist of fate I was dragged into the world of myth by the gods. I was thrown into the world just after the flood, but I was as an old enfeebled Deucalion, left by the gods to the world with a wolf. That wolf killed me in the swamp.

a handful of Dust

When I heard the T.S. Elliot line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," in class the other day a couple of things clicked in to place for me. The first has to do with snakes. Adam is created from dust, and to dust he returns. The snake is condemned to go on his belly and eat dust. We know the origin of snakes from greek learning: snakes are produced when a person dies. They are born of spinal cords. The ideas that the snake eats dust, that we are dust, and that snakes emerge from our corpses all made sense together to me for some reason. So here's how I see it. The snake is the harbinger of wisdom; it was he who told us to eat the apple and become as gods. It is because we ate the apple that we are mortal and in pain. Therefor the snake is both the bringer of the mind and death at the same time. Picture how a snake would looks when it is still in a person's back; its tale is at the human tailbone, and its jaws would be wrapped around the base of the neck. It's like we always carry the snake with us at the top of our spinal cord. The snake holds our wisdom until thought ceases, then it eats its way out of the dust and lives on til it becomes dust itself. Also, it makes sense that Adam and Eve would strike such a deal with the snake; the snake, thanks to Gawd, no longer has any legs, only one long spine. Without spines people have a hard time getting around. This way snakes have a reasonable means of transportation, we get to be vertebrates, and there is a snake born in every man.

Me and Shamat

Me and Shamat

Okay, so here is my mythic dream that I had this semester. It is my sincerest hope that no one actually reads this post because it's more personal than I usually get in my academic studies. Unfortunately it is the only dream I have had this semester which had obvious epic roots, was not totally weird and I could remember. Anyway here goes. In the epic of Gilgamesh there is a wild man living out in the wilderness (go figure). He is all hairy and he was raised by gazelles and he spends his time running around with animals and being their friend. He was also made out of clay, which has nothing to do with my actual dream, but fits in well with the clay man archetype we have seen in so many creation stories this semester. Anyway, one day he is running with his gazelle friends by a watering hole when a hunter guy comes upon him. Enkidu leaves unperturbed with his animal friends and they go back to their animal-house, but the hunter guy is afraid because he has just come upon a towering man who is covered in hair and hanging out with gazelles (which at the time was a relatively rare occurrence). He goes home troubled, thinks the whole situation over, and comes up with a course of action. The next day he goes to church and picks up a hooker named Shamat. In those days church was where one did that sort of thing. He says to the hooker "Hey, I found this giant hairy badass out in the woods and I'm kinda freeked out. Any chance you would go have sex with him and try to smooth this whole thing over?" Shamat shrugs and says "Sure, sounds like an afternoon." Shamat goes out to the watering hole where Enkidu is hanging out with his gazelle buddies. Then she undoes all her clothes and reveals her charms to Enkidu. Enkidu is pleased with this so he takes her and she takes in his scent. Then they git down. For 6 days, and 7 nights. After that they talk and Shamat asks Enkidu to beat up Gilgamesh. The story goes on from there, but from here on out it has nothing to do with my dream. Basically over the course of a night I spent seven nights with Shamat and got to be Enkidu. Hell yes.

The Case of Jupiter vs the State of Montana

Exerpted from the Court Records from the Case of Jupiter vs the State of Montana

• Officer Brown: "Do you know why you're here mister Jupiter?"
• Jupiter: "..."
• Brown: "Mister Jupiter, could you please answer the question"
• Jupiter: "Sure do."
• Brown: "Why are you here?"
• Jupiter: "Because you and all the rest of you gubmint uniformed sonsabitches like to ruin nice folks' days by throwin em in cuffs and cars and puttin them in crappy little rooms like this one to ask them a load of stupid questions!"
• Brown: "Mister Jupiter please contain yourself..."
• Jupiter: "Like Hell! You want me contained you can try to do it yourself boy, I ain't got time for this load a bulls.."
• Brown: "Then let's keep this short mister Jupiter. If you would just answer our questions we can all leave early."
• Jupiter: "Fine by me, longs you don't keep askin stupid questions like you just done."
• Brown: "I'll try to refrain. Where were you at 10:45 on midsummer's eve?"
• Jupiter: "I was watchin dancin with the stars. One o them pretty stars used to be my girlfriend! Betcha caint say that gubmint boy!"
• Brown: "No mister Jupiter, I can't."
• Jupiter: "You're god damn right you can't! It's because I got a little somethin I like to call sexitude. Somethin I'm sure a hat like you wouldn't know nothin about."
• Brown "I'm sure I wouldn't. You have a son named Herm, mister Jupiter?"
• Jupiter: "Ayuh."
• Brown: "And your wife's name is... Junebug is it not?"
• Jupiter: "It is."
• Brown: "Mister Jupiter, did you or did you not kill Junebug Jupiter's dog on midsummer's eve?"
• Jupiter: "I would never do somethin like that, that's totally ridiculous! If I need something done when I'm watching dancing with the stars I tell the boy to do it."
• Brown: "Let me get this straight: you ordered your underage son to kill your wife's dog?"
• Jupiter: "You're god damn right I did! I even got up during the commercial break to get him the bread knife outa the drawer he caint reach."
• Brown: "Mister Jupiter, why did..."
• Jupiter: "I said to him, I said 'Boy you gonna go make yoself useful; go out round back where that good for nothin dog of your mother's is and I want you to kill that sumbitch.' He said 'But paw, the dog's mean, I don't wanna kill him and he won't let me nohow anyway!' I says 'Like hell he will! You just read him one o them boring assed book reports you always writin for school. It'll put him right to sleep then you jist cut his head off.'"
• Brown: "Why did you do this?"
• Jupiter: "I had to git back what was mine."
• Brown: "According to your wife the dog was doing it's job guarding your shared property."
• Jupiter: "Shared property my foot!"
• Brown: "Your wife said he was guarding the family cow."
• Jupiter: "Let me tell you something mister government man. That weren't just no cow, that was my lover and my wife is a jealous bitch who deserves what she gets."
• Brown: "Ummm... Mister Jupiter I'm really not sure how to respond to that. Needless to say you are herebye formally placed under arrest for..."
• Jupiter: "For jack shit! I aint done nothin wrong. Junebug's the one you should be talkin to! I'm not the crazy one here! I aint the one who turned the dog's faceskin into a sweater for the cat!"
• Here ends the court record of Jupiter vs Montana