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.