October 28 Myth lecture notes
The End
“We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” –T.S. Eliot, the Four Quartets
**Remember that life is cyclical**
James Joyce: Finnigan’s Wake
The weariness of life, you’ve got to deal with the situation
-Best thing to do is talk to them and begin to understand
-It is up to the woman to remember everything, and she becomes very sad at the end because she can remember and her lover (men) cannot
-The world is not only going to come to an end, but it’s already the end and it repeats over and over again
-I.e. The Notebook
-“How do you know what you think until you think what you say?”
Ch. 4-Eliade, pg. 54
Eschatology-doctrine to the end of the world
Ontogeny-life of an individual is the same as the life of a culture; the development or developmental history of an individual organism
The Seven Ages of Man
- birth-the infant mulling and puking in the nurse’s arms
- kids
- fancy young adult
- soldiers
- middle aged merchant
- advanced middle age
- the end, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”
Doesn’t it make you happy to know that you can have such a deep feeling to feel sad?
-The tear jerker movies!
-Why? Because it is so artful, it is the artist who helps us deal with sadness so artfully
-Sublimated sadness into beauty like Adonis and his transformation into a flower
Catharsis-the purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, esp. through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music.
Freud- “We laugh in order to keep from crying, if we couldn’t laugh, we would be crying all the time”
Laugh until we cry? Or do we cry until we laugh?
Dacrygelosis- alternating laughing and weeping
-Don’t take life so seriously because you’re not going to get out alive anyways!
Apocalypicists:
1. Literal-there is a time and place for the end of the world
2. Metaphorical-end of the world has already occurred, we just have not noticed, we aren’t smart enough to see the cyclical ending of the world
-We must wait to see the curtain lifted to see truth
Pythagoras:
A man who says its preferred not to eat meat because you don’t know its source-could be your grandma? Yikes.
Watch: Zed and Two Noughts
-Movie about decomposition
Children’s death tunes:
“The worms crawl in, “Ring around the rosy
The worms crawl out, a pocket full of posies
The worms play pea-knuckle Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!”
On your snout”
Another version of the worm song:
The Worms Crawl In,The Worms Crawl Out,
Into your stomach,
And out your mouth.
They eat your intestines,
They scramble your heart.
Now you feel like
you’re all apart.
This is how
it is to die
you end up looking
like apple pie!
Ovid explains the transformation from decomposition of death to something graceful and beautiful:
What happens to your spinal cord when you die? It turns into a snake
Pg. 519: Ovid is talking about the vegetarian Pathegoras, “for all things change, but no thing dies, the spirit wanders: here and there, at will, the soul can journey from and animal into a human body”
Overcomes the doctrine of tragedy, a sophisticated version of reincarnation
If what you write down remains, then you shall remain
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