A couple of weeks ago, I was called a literary snob.  At first I got a little pissed off and then was told that it was a compliment.  I have no real interest in contemporary literature; I'll read contemporary non-fiction, but that's about it.  Since Harry Potter seems to come up in every lit class, I might have to see what all the hoopla is about.  However, last week I tried to open my horizon and read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
       It was alright, had a lot of violence and a decent plot.  But, spoiler alert, the last page the "judge" danced and danced the night away and said he was never going to die because he never sleeps.  Everywhere I look, I'm seeing death right now. 
    We've talked about a lot of deep issues in class this semester and luckily without reaching any answers.  Gerrit has a good argument on accepting any one true religion.  If you were so sure about a religion and have all the answers, then what's the point of living and picking up new knowledge-he says it better than I plagarize.
     What I've taken the most from this class is to just do it and make heat, don't put off anything for tomorrow, and its not what you do, but what you read.  I'll stick to reading what I like.

Zach Stenberg

Tracings

Conchis; A Generous Shaman on The Dancing Ground

            If a reader chooses to read The Magus on the surface and not read into the text, then the reader will more than likely judge Conchis as a cruel-sadist-torturous self-serving bastard.  And who could blame the reader initially?  However, if the reader doesn’t judge Conchis but looked at the initiation that he was offering Nicholas, then the reader could see how generous Conchis was.

            At some point in Conchis’s life he had a call, he experienced separation and an initiation that he answered.  Conchis died and was reborn in that initiation.  He refers to Nicholas as the “elect,” and that is our first clue of a shamanic figure. 

            Shamanism is suggested to have origins all the way back to the Paleolithic period, or somewhere around 40,000 years ago.  Shamans can be women in some societies, but for the most part they’re men.  Shamans can be magicians, healers or doctors, priests, storytellers, and even evil Shamans.  Mircea Elieade defines shamanism as the following: “First definition of this complex phenomenon, and perhaps the least hazardous, will be Shamanism= technique of ecstasy (Eliade, 4).  The technique of ecstasy is the ability to get into a trance and communicate with spirits when someone is sick, dying, missing, funeral rites, or other rituals of the community that the Shaman performs.  For the Shaman, “the Shaman specializes in a trance during which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld” (Eliade, 5).

            Dudley Young offers his definition of what a Shaman is:

a)    Shaman’s job is to incarnate pneuma on the dancing ground. 

b)    Such incarnation tends to arouse in us the intolerably orgiastic energy, for we fear and desire it even more than we do the discarnate thunderstorm.

c)     Alpha is already the object of our ambivalent love-hatred, because he is the most real (the world means royal).  This means that, dancing aside, we already dream about eating him.

d)    Alpha, the most real, is therefore the worst candidate for shaman: the best would be his antithesis, the most unreal.

e)     How do you make a man really unreal? You kill him and then bring him back to life.

f)     If shaman can have already been dismembered and magically reconstituted by gods, he can conduct the dismembering pneuma  into our midst without being torn apart by it; nor shall our teeth be tempted, for his flesh doubtless tastes of something else.

g)     The paradox is perfect: at his most lively he is most dead-a lightning rod, in fact,” (Young,119).

            The Shaman can also be a psychopomp, a guide to escort the souls to the afterlife like Hermes; they also can serve as guides through the various transitions of life.  Shamans are separated from the community; they are chosen either hereditary, a call from the spirits, or an election (Eliade, 13).  Shamans are of the “elect” and as such they have access to a region of the sacred inaccessible to other members of the community (Eliade, 8).  In some societies, they are not just a priest, but also an actual messenger to the spirit world.

            Before the elect becomes a shaman, he/she has to have a call or a sign, and then must have an initiation.  “Before he comes a Shaman and begins his new and true life by a “separation” that is, as we shall presently see, by a spiritual crisis that is not lacking in a tragic greatness and in beauty”(Eliade, 13).  Physical signs at first are epileptic fits; an actual epileptic attack initiation of the candidate is equivalent to a cure (Eliade, 27).

            Among the Tungus of the Tranbaikal region, he who wishes to become a Shaman announces that the spirit of a dead Shaman has appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to succeed him.   For this public declaration to be regarded as true, it must include a considerable degree of mental derangement, such as epileptic fits and a sickness on the brink of death (Eliade, 16). 

            For the Yakut, the perfect Shaman, “must be serious, possess tact, be able to convince his neighbors; above all, he must not be presumptuous, proud, ill-tempered.  One must feel an inner force in him that does not offend yet in conscious of its power”(Eliade, 290).  Nicholas possesses all the characteristics of what a Shaman should not have, and yet that makes him a perfect candidate for the initiation.  In order for Nicholas to become a shaman, he must die.  “For the elect to return to the chaos and that a new personality is about to be born, “All the tortures, trances or initiatory rites that accompany and prolong this “return to chaos” represent, as we have seen, stages in a mystical death and resurrection-in the last analysis, the birth of a new personality” (Eliade, 81).

            So all of the productions that Conchis puts on for Nicholas were for Nicholas’s benefit.  The benefit was that Nicholas could see death for what it was and then know freedom.  Conchis was of the highest Shaman and wanted to spare Nicholas from consciously being dismembered and torn to pieces.  If Conchis would not have turned Nicholas into a righteous and pious candidate, Conchis then risked the chance of Nicholas turning into an Alpha-Shaman and corrupt.

            Thus on Conchis’s part of the island he created a Dancing Ground.  By Conchis invoking a real life theatre, “the dominant form the dram actually took place was the dismembering of alpha on the dancing ground”(Young, 112).

            When the Shaman is in his truly high ecstatic state, his audience becomes spared from being dismembered as in G of Young’s outline.  Saul Salomon could do this as a storyteller in the deep jungles in Amazon in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller.  Dudley Young could not describe this in prose, nor shall I.  Young left it Coleridge:

                                   

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes in holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

                                                                        “Kubla Khan”

            Conchis told Nicholas four stories as the role of the storyteller.  The Norwegian Wood story was an attempt to offer the divine to Nicholas in a direct manner.  Before Conchis tells Nicholas the Norwegian Wood story, he and Nicholas begin to talk about religion and if god exists.  Conchis had already prearranged the setting and script for the dancing ground, and the dance of the night.  With Conchis being a shaman, his role brings out the intolerably orgiastic energy as Young laid out, the mere presence of Julie is enough to drive Nicholas to the brink.  The reader of The Magus may very well view this as Conchis torturing Nicholas, but Conchis only has Nicholas’s best interests in mind.  By bringing Nicholas into an ecstatic trance, Conchis is sparing Nicholas of physical pain and sparagmosos or dismemberment. 

            Conchis pauses and turns away to allow Julie to give Nicholas a message about a rendezvous and then says, “Just then she paid us the compliment of making god male.  But I think she knows, as all true women do, that all profound definitions of god are essentially definitions of the mother.  Of giving things.  Sometimes the strangest gifts.  Because the religious instinct is really the instinct to define whatever gives each situation”(Fowles, 302).

            Conchis describes the Norwegian farm as a paradise or a utopia free from distraction of the secular world, a place “where nature was triumphant over man” and “man was nothing in it.”  A perfect setting for a separation from humanity has presented itself to the elect.  To many in the active practicing world of religion, this is what its all about according to Eliade.   “Christianity is ruled by the longing for Paradise. “Praying towards the East re-connects us with the paradisiac themes…To turn towards the East appears to be an expression of the nostalgia for Paradise” (Eliade 67).  In the present day, repenting from the world and possessing the want to go back to in illo tempore is the desire for the truly pious.

            Conchis on the third day discovered the family’s secret that Gustav’s brother was living on the farm.  Gustav acknowledged this fact and said, “I think we are all crazy here.”  Gustav brought out Stone Age articles and said he had found them at Seidevarre, which meant “hill of the holy stone,” the dolmen.

            Henrik, the insane brother, had married Ragna, which is an interesting name in such a rich environment of paganism.  Ragnarok is a Norse Myth where many of the gods will die, natural disaster occurs, and the Earth will be drowned in water.  When the world comes back from the great drowning, the remaining gods will meet and two humans will begin the world anew.

            Conchis is depicting a rich mythic-state for Nicholas here.  The Norwegian wood now develops into a mystic place, an origin of that great place (Golden Age) that great time for which many have nostalgia to be at that divine place, freedom.  Conchis, the alpha-shaman is constructing the dancing ground to come alive to Nicholas if his ears are open to it.

            Gustav describes Henrik as a Jansenist, which according to the dictionary is, “The theological principles of Cornelis Jansen, which emphasize predestination, deny free will, and maintain that human nature is incapable of good.”  However, Gustav or Conchis says that Henrik believed that he was of the elect in his system, and that he did not come to Seidevarre to meditate, but to hate, as Nicholas Urfe was doing at Greece.  Nicholas was not letting be be, but rather immersing himself in the pursuit of more sexual conquests, instead of paying attention to Conchis and the gift of life that he is offering.

            Henrik turned away from everything so that one day he might see god.  Gustav said, “He wanted to be blind.  It made it more likely that one day he would see”(312).  Henrik accepted his call.  He wrote two biblical texts in his blood ten years before and then waited for god. 

            Exodus and Esdras both contain the pillar of fire.  In Exodus, god gave the Israelites fire at night so they could travel and flee from the Pharaoh.   Pillar of Fire is the idea where people are in the presence of god.  god shows that he is in their presence by the heat and light of a pillar of fire.  Henrik did not need to see god because he would feel his presence.

            When Henrik did see god and felt his presence, Conchis said that he would have given ten years of his life to see what was going through Henrik’s mind.  Conchis was giving a glimpse of what he could offer to Nicholas.  In this sublime story of the Norwegian Wood, Conchis gives Nicholas and Julie the meaning, “All that is past possesses our present.  Seidevarre possesses Bourani.  Whatever happens here now, whatever governs what happens, is partly, no, is essentially what happened thirty years ago in that Norwegian forest”(Fowles, 317).

            Since the past possesses the present, perhaps that is why Conchis had Montaigne in mind when he saw the texts inscribed to Henrik’s beams.  Conchis said that the texts in Henrik’s cabin reminded him of Montaigne because he had forty-two proverbs and quotations etched on beams in his study.  Montaigne is an interesting example for Conchis to use.  Montaigne had some biblical verses on his beams, but he had many more sayings from classical-skeptic philosophers at that.  Montaigne had four quotes from Lucretius on his beams: “O wretched minds of men! O blind hearts! In what darkness of life and in how great dangers is passed this term of life whatever its duration. (II.14)  All things, together with heaven and earth and sea, are nothing to the sum of the universal sum. (VI.678-9)  No new delight may be forged by living on. (III.1081) The whole race of man has overgreedy ears.”  (IV.598)

            Why was Conchis throwing this into the story? Nicholas more than likely knew of Montaigne and perhaps knew that Montaigne’s essays had been on the Church’s ban list for over 100 years.  Perhaps Conchis in a subtle way was trying to allude to Nicholas that the only thing certain is that we are going to die, and if we embrace that fact, only then can we be reborn and experience life and freedom.  Montaigne came to terms with his sadness of death by writing an essay “To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die.” 

            Montaigne quotes Cicero in his first sentence: “Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die.  That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death,” (Montaigne, 89).  He is describing ecstasy in its purest form.  Instead of fearing death, we should embrace death in order that we can live life knowing freedom.  With respect to the different schools of philosophy in Montaigne’s day, he said, “Let us skip through those most frivolous trivialities” (Montaigne, 90).  Conchis used the term lilas for what the Buddhists used for trivial matters.  It doesn’t matter how we put death into words; death is simply going to happen.  Or as Wallace Stevens writes in “The only Emperor is The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Let be be finale of seem.” And more convincingly Montaigne uses Horace: “All of our lots are shaken about in the urn, destined sooner or later to be cast forth, placing us in everlasting exile via Charon’s boat,” (Horace, Odes).  We all are only destined for one thing, death.  The Romans were so conflicted with death that they didn’t say, “He is dead,” but rather, “He has ceased to live,” or, “He has lived.”  Fear the only thing that is certain in life.  By choosing to live a life by this credo, the Romans imprisoned their lives by possessing a constant fear as many people do so today.  If life is a play and only lasts for two hours, then we must act.  Montaigne states, “I deal myself the best hand I can, and then accept it” (Montaigne, 95).

            If we come to terms with death and get to know it, converse about it and realize that in fact it is a gift, then we begin to rob death of its terror.  Montaigne suggests, “To practice death is to practice freedom.  A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.  Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint” (Montaigne, 96).  In knowing death, we are liberated and the new found freedom allows the free to act.

            Montaigne proposes another idea to deal with.  Instead of conforming to a certain dogma and religion where the follower must go under a mythic death and then be reborn, Montaigne suggests to accept and embrace death.  Steal the terror behind death and realize that fearing death is a mere trifle of life.  With death the only thin one-hundred percent certain in life, to say, “I’m going to die and fear not,” can be a liberating moment in our lives.  Alas, some initiates are hard learners and need to be physically restrained and stripped of all their dignity.

            Alas, Nicholas had to be restrained and drugged before he could have freedom while making a conscious decision.  The trial was probably coming regardless if Nicholas would have embraced the initiation.  By choosing distractions and mere trivialities for simple answers, we miss out on life and life’s waning days.  In the grand scheme of our stories, the end is fast approaching to reclaim our anima or soul.  Montaigne said it best in quoting Lucretius, “The present will soon be the past, never to be recalled.”

Bibliography

Eliade, Mircea.  Shamanism.  First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Printing, 1972

Young, Dudley. Origins of The Sacred.  ST. Martin’s Press New York, 1991.

Llosa, Mario Vargas. The Storyteller. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.

Eliade, Mircea. Myths, Dreams, And Mysteries. Harper Torchbooks,1975.

Montaigne, Michel De. The Complete Essays. Penguin Books,1987.

Fowles, John. The Magus. Random House, 1975.

Pillar of Fire

I thought that I had a good idea on where I wanted to go with my project, but ole Niztzsche's overman was just not lining up with Conchis as a storyteller.  I'd like to think of myself as a careful reader, but I really missed a lot of the Norwegian wood story the first couple of times.  On the third or fourth reading, I decided to read into the names and places of everything and as a "storyteller" would take careful action in annunciation of their names.  Henrik didn't jump out, but worshiping at a dolmen at all the ole relics of the stone age did.  Every hero in a myth almost always has a maiden as a guide or lover at his side.  Henrik's loyal and faithful wife Ragna made me pause-Ragnarok jumped out at me. 
While telling the story, Conchis says that Henrik went to Seidevarre not to meditate but to hate.  Henrik had become a misanthrope and he married to avert or slow down his hate for fellow earthlings.  If our poor chap Nicholas would have been playing closer attention to the story instead of playing footsy with Julie, perhaps he would have caught the several references to "Pillar of Fire."  I wanted to hear Pale Fire for obvious reasons and so I missed it the first couple of times.  I don't think nor care if Conchis thought he was god and thus Julie and Nicholas were in the presence of god, but that's not the point.  Nicholas was always worried about the "trivial" things of life and Conchis even gives him the Buddhism term of lilas.  I can't be too hard on Nicholas because I would have been more interested in playing footsy as well.  Well maybe not because from the beginning I would have know that I was going through an initiation and would have played my part accordingly.

Meandering

     I felt compelled to read The Storyteller.  One minute I see Conchis as a shaman and the next I'm not so sure, but Conchis is a storyteller.  In some cultures, one aspect of the shaman is storytelling.  Apparently in the Amazon, the seripigari or shaman does not take on that role exclusively.  Though the two roles intertwine in the culture, the storyteller walks and keeps the mythology of the people alive as long as he keep walking for the sun.
     At some point in The Magus, Conchis had some kind of initiation or revelation and now plays the role accordingly as he see's fit.  At first I thought he was an Evil Shaman and got off in fucking with our poor chap Nicholas.  However, the four stories in the text have a profound meaning with me for some reason.  I think the Norwegian Wood story is the most poignant and Nietzsche's Zarathustra jumped out to me when Gerrit was talking about the Norwegian Wood story.  I've read Zarathustra a couple of times but I'm hoping this time I'll find an interlink with the wood story.
     Back to The Storyteller, which could almost be argued as an epic except for founding a new city. Saul seeks for a culture to continue walking and living,  instead of the tribes in the Amazon conforming from paganism to the "true" religion of the world.
     Conchis always gave Nicholas the choice to leave and to end the initiation.  Nicholas refused.  Saul was going to settle down and marry a woman, but his bride to be killed herself because she would be the blame for no more stories.  Saul was given some advice, "It's a warning that you must either pay heed to or ignore," Tasurinchi said to me.  "If I were you, I wouldn't ignore it.  Because each man has his obligation."
     I'm curious what Nicholas's obligation was to life or my obligation to life.  Was Nicolas to love Alison and live the American dream? Je ne sais pas.  Are we to walk or conform? I prefer to walk.
    Saul thinks about becoming a shaman and going through the initiation, but he accepts his fate and keeps on walking and telling stories.  He knows and embraces his script or role in his story.
    I've often thought of freedom and especially in this country as one of the biggest myths and illusions in history.  Martin Luther King Jr. said something to the affect that a person sometimes has to walk through a prison before finding or experiencing freedom.  A few years ago I thought it would be a good idea to go to France and join the French Foreign Legion and if I was still alive after five years I would have had my freedom as a French citizen.  Then I blew out my knee fighting a forest fire and had to reconfigure.  I love what Frye said, "It's now what we do but what we read."
   Saul laid out his freedom, "What I really wanted to say is that, before, I wasn't what I am now.  I became a storyteller after being what you are at this moment: listeners.  That's what I was, a listener.  It happened without my willing it, little by little.  Without even realizing it, I began finding my destiny.  Slowly, calmly.  It appeared bit by bit.  Not with tobacco juice, or with ayahuasca brews.  Or with the help of the seripigari (shaman).  I discovered it all by myself."
   Perhaps Nicholas should have "paid attention" and listened.  Now I just need to find a piece of literature that parallels the freedom story.  I think I have some ideas but would gladly take suggestions.  Viva la republique!

For some reason the Norwegian Wood story reminded me of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.  By the brother going into solitude and being the over-man he reached that ecstasy moment or nirvana and was freed.  The four stories seemed like plays within plays and were all choices on different paths where Nicholas could have went down.  With all the deception going on Nicholas missed that he ultimately had choices.  Perhaps I'm reading into all of this too much.
I'm trying to get into poetry a little bit and started reading a little Wallace Stevens.  I randomly went to Dutch Graves In Bucks County and a poem I think about war, death, time, and archaic truth.  The whole piece is worth reading and maybe relevant or not.
An end must come in a merciless triumph,
An end of evil in a profounder logic,
In a peace that is more than a refuge,
In the will of what is common to all men,
Spelled from spent living and spent dying.
And you, my semblables, in gaffer-green,
Know that the past is not part of the present. (?????)
Who are the mossy cronies muttering,
Monsters antique and haggard with past thought?
What is the crackling of voices in the mind,
The pitter-pater of archaic freedom, 
Of the thousands of freedoms except our own?
And you, my semblables, whose ecstasy
Was the glory of heaven in the wilderness-

Time was not wasted in your subtle temples.
No: nor divergence made too steep to follow down.

I don't write or underline in books very often because it's distracting to me and feels like a chore.  In Ch. 24, Conchis is telling the story of when Lily said she wanted to marry him.  I actually underlined most of the paragraph, "But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion.  It is only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling.  And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did."

As much as I enjoy being a deconstructionist about America and having actually read Hobbes and Locke seeing what social contract was all about (keeping rich white people rich).  I do forget about sacrifices my grandparents and parents have made for me to have life.  Some question and answers are perhaps better off not being answered since the answer equates death.

Quality Shmality

     I like to think back to the Greeks and the seven books of a liberal arts education that every citizen should have to become a better citizen.  America used to be deeply rooted in the Classics for education.  People got their undergraduate degree and then if they so desired went on to obtain a graduate or professional degree. 
    In the last 30 years, America's promising wanted accelerated programs and many went into finance.  Instead of two years of graduate school, why not one? The late 80s' had the savings and loans bust and hundreds of assholes went to jail for insider trading and fraudulent loans.  The "Great Recession" only a handful of people have went to jail and every body blames someone else.
     I study literature because it makes me want to be a better man and human being.  I almost switched majors to Econ and Accounting last semester.  The tests were objective and my "education" was very measurable.  However, there was a problem, I looked at things on how to monetize them.  I didn't want to become a business man with no ethics.  My insurance guy who I got my workers comp,  proudly told me he never read a book in college.  When I blew out my knee fighting forest fires, the doctor said it was a bad sprain.  When it got worse he told me the pain was in my head.  Then an MRI showed I had the triage and needed reconstructive surgery.  If these two hacks would have read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich they might have some compassion to fellow human beings and heaven forbid, be better at their jobs.
     Colleges today have something like a 50% percent graduation rate. I know its hard for out of touch politicians in an Oligarchy to quantify inspiration and passion, but what happens when a student takes a geology class and finds a passion for the outdoors instead of an accounting class?  My brother graduated in Finance and had no job offers upon graduation.  I did an internship at a paper in North Dakota this summer and received two job offers.  I'm rather certain I don't want to live in North Dakota, but I'll stick with English.  Plus my blood pressure is lower than my brother even though he has more money than me.

I was startled...

I was startled while reading For The Time Being on how individual life can be represented in simple numbers.  When I hear how amazing China's Great Wall and Egypt's Pyramids are, thanks to Annie Dillard I can't but help think about all of the deaths that went into the creation of the objects.  My dad told me that when he was in Rome at the Coliseum that it was pretty eerie to think that over a million people had died there.
The Stalin quote was disturbing where something about when one person is killed its a tragedy, and when a thousand die it's a statistic.  I've often wondered about Stalin and how he over saw "Marxism" and the death of upwards of 30 million people, and yet we always hear about Hitler and the Nazis. 
I once heard that when a family found out that their next child had down syndrome and they were okay with it because, "It's a test from god," or something, that seemed like one of the most fucked up statements I've ever heard.  I've heard many Christians say that god is all powerful and knowing.  I like how Dillard left it as an either or, when she brought up is god passive, oblivious, or simply selective in the world's affairs.  Some of the Atheists and Christian writers I've read turned me off by their arrogance and certainty of the subject of god.
The question on page 95, What are we doing here? actually kind of freaked me out, because I don't know.  Je ne sais pas sounds much better to my ears, but even the Frenchies haven't answered that question and I don't know if anyone has.
I always get a kick when people ask me what I'm going to do with an English degree.  Je ne sais pas is a favorite, perhaps a goat herder in Kansas.  What I absolutely can't stand is when I hear god has a plan.  Life sounds pretty sad according to Dillard, "Time: You can't chock the wheels.  We sprout, ripen, fall, and roll under the turf again at a stroke."  Thank the high heavens for Caesar and his calender, it would have been awful to live so long in the old testament days.
I'm startled by the prayer, "que le garçon, dont j'ai reve, me parle."The angel collects the notes in a silk bag and delivers them.  I wonder to whom. god?  The bible says that children have a guardian angel over them to protect them until I guess they can fend for themselves.  Why does so much horrific shit then happen to children?  My latin professor at Carroll was Father Shea and if there is such a thing as a cool priest, he is.  We used to have a lot of debates over coffee and his answer was, "god gave us free will."  I slammed my hand on the table and said, "that's the biggest fucking cop out in history."  Such a simple and flat answer to a big question.  Gerrit and Jerrod are telling me that there is no such thing as "good" and "evil" though I disagree.  For the time being I'm going to stay with the Lucretius thought and once were dead, were dead and even if there was "higher beings" why would they give two shits about our mere mortal trifles.
Frye startled me because to go further in Literature I'm going to have to read the bible in a scholary fashion.  Spero that spark notes will work.