Liberating Confinement

I am still a bit skeptical about sonnets... however I must admit that our discussion on Monday forced me to look at this topic in a bit more depth. Finding a confined space as liberating is something I have thought about much. 

I have a friend who currently is doing time in MSP, and after the crazy, miserable never-relaxed life he has had, this friend has been able to have a sort of awakening now that he has been forced to take a step out of the "real-world" monotony of distractions and pointless endeavors. He is learning to focus on the beauty of simplicity and living beyond all of the meaningless crap that most of us fill our lives up with.

I tell this story not to go into detail about this friend of mine, but to hopefully illustrate a bit clearer the lens through which I am now attempting to view the sonnet. By nature, I enjoy free writing, free-verse poetry, songs with no chorus, etc. This anti-structuralism, the condition I have diagnosed myself with, is a problem that I am fairly aware of, but I never considered that it could relate to the attempt to cancel out all of the "strutting and fretting" and distractions that can sometimes cloud free-verse writing. 

Having fourteen lines in which to convey an entire message, especially a message of something as complicated and multidimensional as love, is complected to say the least. I don't think that writing a semi-respectable sonnet is okay. After much contemplation and sonnet-reading though, I believe that writing in this way can sometimes require even more talent than free verse. If one can do this well, not alright, but truly well, the results can be very rewarding. 

My sonnet currently has an outline, which I will not reveal just yet, but even though I still do not particularly enjoy sonnets, I am working on that. I do have a better understanding now, though, of how a "confined space", even in literature, has the potential to be freeing. 

-AS   

Sonnets and Other Musings...

Sonnets have always bothered me. In fact, I have yet to come across a sonnet that I did not absolutely despise. Perhaps it is the sickly sweet "perfect" way they depict love. Love is not perfect. Well, perhaps love itself is. But a relationship between two people, even a romantic one, is full of pain and trouble. I may have a bit of a cynical outlook in this area, but the "fairy tale" sonnets are cheesy and cliche. 

Another problem with these poems is their structure. It is all but impossible to cram feelings of love into a 14-line patterned-rhyme cookie cutter mold. The results are hollow and cramped, and often sacrifice beauty and flow for syllable count and rhyme correctness. Sonnets are so popular that love has been transformed (in the poetic literary world) into a theatrical flowers-and-butterflies dream-state. Which is not what it is intended to be. In modern society, where these sonnets have been implemented into romantic comedies and happily-ever-after stories, TRUE selfless honest love has been overlooked. This had led to young people growing up believing that infatuation and love are the same thing, and that marriage on butterflies alone is good enough. But a life can not be built on butterflies, as many people find out a year or two or ten into their marriage when the flame is gone and the fuzzy feelings are gone and they are left with a painful divorce and a wasted irreplaceable hole in their lives.

I do believe, as we discussed in class, that some writings are not meant to have a "deeper meaning". Sometimes, the deeper meaning, or interpretation, kills the magic of the piece. By the same token though, the distraction epidemic that is so prevalent in modern culture is not improved in the slightest by wasting hours reading extremely cramped, closed-structured, irritating poems. The monotony of day to day life, and all of the crap that we have filled it with, leaves us searching for SOME thing that means something. We are distracted because we are searching for something. Searching, in a sense, for silence. In my humble opinion, sonnets counteract this mission by adding to the "clutter".

Anyhow, for this class we are required to each write a sonnet about love. I look forward to the challenge of writing one that I can actually stand to read. Rhymes irk me. However, with a natural sentence flow I believe I can take the emphasis off of the choppy, annoying pattern of the typical sonnet. I will also tweak the theme a bit to make it focus on escaping love through infatuation. 
This will lead to a much more interesting piece than the sing-songy puppy-love disgustingness that is embodied in many if not most sonnets I have dealt with in my English career thus far.

-AS    

"Mis"reading

I have never bought into the myth that there is such a thing as reading something "wrong". Perhaps this is due to my lack of formal black-and-white right-and-wrong juvenile high school English classes. Because I was home schooled, I had a very open mind when it comes to interpretations, and because I am a literature fanatic, I always can find many meanings behind even the simplest verse or tale. This is something that I am grateful for, but I have recognized over the past year or so that many people do believe in singular right-or-wrong interpretations. 

The one thing that makes good writing good, though, is its ability to speak to broad audiences. Speaking to these masses can be accomplished only through writing that has many layers of interpretative value. This is what makes a "play" or "performance" real. Without generalizing too much, I would have to agree with the idea that English majors come at truth and realness from a different perspective. But this is also true for each individual. 

Fictional and/or poetic writing, like other art forms including art, music, etc., is valued for the way it speaks to people. And because each individual is a walking autobiography, there can't possibly be a universal point to a piece of this type of literature. The term "mything" the point, though, I believe to be a bit deceiving. Myths are, by definition, imaginary or fictitious. However interpretations are not mythical. They are autobiographical.

I am not sure if I am making my point clear in this post, but basically I do not think that there is such a thing as reading something wrong. Any piece of writing that is worth its salt can, in fact, be interpreted in a myriad of ways. But to interpret things in mythical ways is only useful if those myths can in turn be related to one's own life. 

-AS     

Dreams...

As Emily stated in her most recent blog, I also believe that the term "dream" is thrown around rather loosely in modern society. It is used to mean literal dreams, but also to mean hopes for the future, goals, aspirations, and realities that will never come to be. The dictionary definition of this is: a succession of images, thoughts, or emotions passing through the mind during sleep, or an involuntary vision experienced while awake. In these types of dreams, the subconscious mind is dominating the "real" mind. However the only obstacle that makes the "real" mind, or conscious mind, more important (in my opinion) is individual people's desire for control over their emotions and feelings.

So as not to stunt my readers' creativity with my own bias interpretation, I will objectively relate my most recent "complete" dream below. I will also note that I can not remember dreams with any amount of completeness on normal nights, as I have issues with sleeping. After taking Advil PM or similar sleeping aids though, I sleep well and therefore dream quite vividly.

My dream begins at a family reunion on my mom's side. It is a second-rate lake resort somewhere in the middle of the U.S. While there, we receive word that we are required to register ourselves as militia-men and register our firearms in order to keep them. I, of course, take my m4 and join my brothers and dad in the walk across the country to wherever, as there are no working vehicles or other methods of transportation. We travel across farmland, avoiding cities, but somehow we run into government hitmen anyway on a farm between haystacks. I am separated from the guys. Later, I meet up with a half dozen random people, two of which also have weapons, and we travel together for a while. In some sandy place with red rock cliffs, we realize that "going to register" was a sham, and that the government is merely trying to "round up" the "troublemakers" to have them executed. I break off from my new friends and end up living in a tourist cabin in a deserted cove near the ocean somewhere where there is snow. I live here for a month or two with a boy I met - we love and hate each other, but we trust each other which is all that matters. We become hardened toward life, caring little about anything but ourselves, using each other for protection and occasionally for emotional release; we forget what it is like to be happy and carefree. Eventually, I wind up leaving him too, and meeting up with my brothers, dad, and the rest of my family. We move all of the items from the farmhouse in which I found my mother and the little children, back to our home. But find that nothing is the same. So we pack up the belongings again (not ours... but no one's now) and hit the road. 
The end.

 Weird, yes. Political, yes. But definitely an insight into my subconscious.

-AS

Shakespearean Insults

Finally getting around to posting my favorite insults haha. And yes, I used all three of them this weekend at a party. Good times ;)

1. Thou artless common-kissing hedge-pig.

2. Thou vain earth-vexing lout.

3. Thou warped half-faced haggard.

Love and Desire

While I have not yet made it through the entire thing, I wanted to take a little time to talk about the first few paragraphs of "The Bottom Translation" of A Midsummer Night's Dream; namely, the distinction between love, and desire.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind according to Helena in her rant about love and madness. 

Does desire also look with “mind,” and not with “the eyes”? Titania awakens from Pier  dream, looks  at the monster, and desires him. When Lysander and Demetrius awaken, they see only a girl’s body, and desire it. Is desire “blind” and love “seeing”? Or is love “blind” and desire “seeing”? This essay asks. 

Frankly, I believe that Helena is correct in her statement; however I don't think that she is meaning to talk about actual love. True love looks with the heart as well as the mind. It is seeing, because it is complete truth, and honesty. It is desire that is blindness. Love is a feeling but also a sincere commitment - it is not something that can be created from air, or changed with drugs overnight. Infatuation, though, is a different matter; it is purely chemical. People fall in and out of this quite often; when the "high" fades, it leaves its victim empty and in withdrawals. Whereas love has the potential to result in "sacred marriage", infatuation leads to only a futile, fleeting attempt at forever. Trusting in infatuation causes nothing but heartache and hurt, because infatuation is purely selfish. Sadly, modern society often fails to recognize this difference...

-AS  

A Midsummer Night's Dream video

It's long especially if ya aren't into the dance thing, but this is lovely.

"Disturbing" comedy

The Conqueror Worm

LO! 't is a gala night   Within the lonesome latter years. An angel throng, bewinged, bedight   In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre to see             A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully   The music of the spheres.    Mimes, in the form of God on high,   Mutter and mumble low,    And hither and thither fly;   Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things   That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their condor wings      Invisible Woe.    That motley drama—oh, be sure   It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore   By a crowd that seize it not,    Through a circle that ever returneth in   To the self-same spot; And much of Madness, and more of Sin,   And Horror the soul of the plot.    But see amid the mimic rout   25   A crawling shape intrude: A blood-red thing that writhes from out   The scenic solitude! It writhes—it writhes!—with mortal pangs   The mimes become its food,   30   And over each quivering form   In human gore imbued.    Out—out are the lights—out all!   And over each quivering form The curtain, a funeral pall,   35   Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan,   Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"   And its hero, the Conqueror Worm This poem by Edgar Allan Poe does a very good job of portraying the micro-cosom/macro-cosom distinction that we discussed in class today. The worm does, eventually, consume the flesh of the person who is a much "higher" creature, completing the circle from the gods, to the aristrocrats, to the peasants, to chaos. Poe writes very much like Shakespeare-capturing the raw reality of human existence in an eloquent, universal way. Many elements of this poem, such as the blood and writhing and human gore, mirror the sort of sick, disturbing, pathological tones of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. While both are intended to create enjoyment, these works also both carry a heavy, unsettling view of the world. How they do this and yet remain, in a sense, "comedy" is indeed facinating. -AS

Macbeth Act 1, Scene 7

Was the hope drunk,

Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since,

And wakes it now, to look so green and pale 

On what it did so freely? From this time

I account thy love. Art thou afeard

To be the same in thine own act and valor

As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that

Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life, 

And live a coward in thine own esteem, 

Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would,"

Like the poor cat i' the adage?

What beast was't, then, 

That made you break this enterprise to me?

When you durst do it then you were a man;

And, to be more than what you were, you would

Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place

Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:

They have made themselves, and that their

fitness now

Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know

How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face, 

Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, 

And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this.

     This is the passage I have chosen, spoken by Lady Macbeth to her husband,to memorize. Although I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to memorizing things, I am looking forward to this passage, merely because it does not bore me like most of the other works I have "had" to memorize in the past. 

     This monologue embodies the character of Lady Macbeth. She is a very complex character; her sadness and desperation and vindictivity combine to form an intriguing and powerful woman and, though we are not reading Macbeth for this class, I believe this character to be "essential".  

--AS