armadylan

Four More Sibyls: Larry Levis’ “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage”

2008-06-10T07:07:00.000-07:00

In his poem, “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” Larry Levis explores the nature of loss, specifically in relation to the failure of the poetic method. Levis threads the mythic tale of the Cumaean Sibyl among parallel stories of four contemporary characters who suffer the same fate as the prophetess, each becoming “sibylline” within their own context. Each character represents an aspect of the poetic process and the implications of its failure. The first of these is the speaker who has lost his connection to the past. Next is the character Stavros who had told the story of the Sibyl but has lost his poetic voice. Third, the Poet himself becomes the Sibyl, no longer able to make concrete connections between things. And finally the reader as the recipient of the poem becomes the Sibyl, entrusted with the continuation of the story. Through portraits of these characters Levis explores the failure of the poetic method and the larger resultant loss of meaning and significance therein. But just as the Sibyl’s apparent collapse of prophetic ability created an enduring and meaningful story, Levis’ “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage” actually succeeds in that which it laments to have failed.

Mythologized by writers from Plato to T.S. Eliot, the Cumaean Sibyl has had exceptional literary currency. According to myth, she was “a prophetess of classical antiquity” (Medieval Folklore 920)[1] who led Aeneas into the underworld and wrote nine books of prophecy, offering to sell them to the King of Rome (Dixon-Kennedy 279). Her prophecies were also written on leaves at the entrance to her cave and “petitioners gathered them before the wind scattered her words” (MF 921). Most importantly to Levis’ poem is the story recorded in the fourteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the Cumaean Sibyl asked Phoebus for “as many birthdays…as there are particles of sand” (Ovid 387), forgetting to ask for eternal youth as well. So when she refused to have sex with him, Phoebus punished the Sibyl by granting her wish, causing her to shrink and wither away. Recounting this story to Aeneas, the Sibyl laments that “the time will come, when long increase of days will so contract me from my present size and so far waste away my limbs with age that I shall dwindle to a trifling weight, so trifling, it will never be believed I once was loved and even pleased a god” (Ovid 387).

I believe Levis chooses the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl for his poem because of its cultural and literary currency, but also because of its parallels to the failure of the poetic method. As D.W. Fenza suggests, “the sibyl seems to be a hyperbolic emblem for all those isolate and dedicated to restlessness and impermanence in Levis’ poetry: only death will put them at ease and relieve them of their myriad desires” (Fenza 16). The Sibyl was a valuable prophetess but her ambition for eternal life and knowledge resulted in the decline of her prophetic ability. That is the danger inherent in the poetic endeavor; amid the proliferation of stories poetry may become meaningless. Fenza shows that the poem “comments on the decadent plurality of styles and the isolation and moral relativism that accompanies a splintering of vision when one has learned too much and desired too much” (Fenza 16). In “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage” Levis equates the Sibyl’s fate with that of the poet’s. Each of his four contemporary characters represent an element of poetic failure parallel to the Sibyl’s prophetic failure.

The poem begins: “It’s a list of what I cannot touch” (1). The speaker then lists objects, places and people that make up a history with which he no longer has a connection. This poem begins in media res, with the speaker already in a position of isolation. In effect the speaker narrates from inside his Sibyl’s cage, attempting to remember and describe the things he has lost. These objects, places and names are symbols of the speaker’s estrangement from his past. Levis provides several images of abandonment, decay and degeneration. The speaker comments on the way innocence returns, comparing it to the “thoughtless” regrowth of flowers in an abandoned labor camp. He forgets the name of a Parisian town and confesses he would not be able to locate the trees there anymore. The details of the cat and the iron grillwork suggest a home that the speaker has left. He visualizes leaving that place as the familiar post office “grow[s] smaller, then lost” (14). Already in this first segment of the poem, Levis visually hints at the Sibyl; the image of the receding landmark mirrors the Sibyl’s receding youth. At the end of this list the speaker is in total isolation, remembering “Country music from a lone radio,” (16) as frost develops on the ground. The cold and desolate weather imagery here renders the emotion of the speaker removed from his own history.

The speaker is sibylline in this introductory segment because in his current state he feels out of touch with his own history. In the poetic process the speaker represents experience and memory. Robbed of his connection with the objects and places of his experience, he loses his ability to recall events and images, an essential part of the poetic process. He is imprisoned by the failure of that memory, yet his nostalgia for his past has a kind of calm desperation as if he has grown used to that estrangement. Levis gives the speaker an elegiac voice as he associatively moves from one item on his list to the next in a careful, orderly lament. Levis often employs this technique illuminated by Halliday: “Levis’ mind is set in motion by a certain scene or image and then its associations of idea and feeling expand in a way that seems unpredictable…and potentially infinite” (Halliday 96). This technique suits the speaker’s condition because it renders well the associations of a failing memory.

Here Levis employs dense punctuation that restrains the rhythm and the one- or two-lined stanza form also contains and restricts the speaker’s lament. The speaker longs to “touch” these things from his past, but is still somewhat removed and objective. This first segment of the poem is the speaker’s systematic response to the question, “Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?” (40). Because of his loss of memory he wants that which he can no longer touch.

After the speaker’s lament for his lost past, Levis introduces the next contemporary sibylline character. The speaker describes the character Stavros as a poet or storyteller who had often told his own version of the myth at a café, but who lost his poetic voice. If the speaker represents loss of experience, Stavros represents the loss of the poetic voice. Levis effectively weaves several narrative layers in this segment of the poem: the speaker’s memory of Stavros and Stavros’ version of the Sibyl’s story. This weaving of narratives successfully links Stavros with the Sibyl. After describing Stavros’ version of the myth, the speaker returns his attention to Stavros:

As the years passed, as even the sunlight began to seem

As if it was listening to him outside the windows

Of the Midi, he began to lose interest in stories, & to speak

Only in abstractions, to speak only of theories,

Never of things (72-6).

Here the speaker clearly makes the connection between Stavros and the Sibyl: the Midi Café becomes Stavros’ “cage” wherein his poetic voice slowly degenerates until he “no longer spoke at all” (78). Levis renders Stavros’ loss of poetic voice in the image of the tree limbs in the city, which “became again // Only the bare limbs of trees; no girl stepped into them / To tell us of their stillness” (81-2). Stavros has lost the poetic inspiration that had previously enabled him to call the tree limbs something more than mere tree limbs. In addition, the bare limbs of trees evoke the image of the cage in which the Sibyl herself was imprisoned. This image returns in various forms throughout the poem.

Sinking deeper Stavros joins the “gypsy Pentecostalists” (83) in a desperate attempt to regain his lost voice. Here the speaker links Stavros again with the Sibyl, whose voice her listeners “could not have recognized… // As anything human” (64-5). The speaker reports Stavros speaking in tongues through the word “Glossolalia” (85). Then the speaker adds his own assessment, saying that the word “was all speech, & none” (85). His assessment demonstrates the impotence of Stavros’ endeavor to regain his voice. Too much speech, like the proliferation of stories, leads to creative poverty. The loss of the poetic voice corresponds to the failure of the poetic method for Stavros. When he loses interest in the telling, the story loses its meaning.

While less explicit than the first two examples of contemporary Sibyls, I believe Levis also inserts a third layer, the sibylline Poet, into his fabric of characters. The speaker had lost his ability to recall his own experience and Stavros had lost his poetic voice; here the Poet loses confidence in his ability to make comparisons. He represents the third element of the poetic process represented by Levis’ contemporary sibyls: the failure of the poetic gift of metaphor. The Poet is differentiated from the speaker and from Levis himself in that he is outside of the text and yet not necessarily the person of Larry Levis. The Poet stands for all poets—all those at risk of suffering the same fate as the Sibyl and as Levis’ contemporary sibylline characters.

Storytelling no longer has special value for the Poet because he cannot make comparisons and connections between things; like Stavros’ bare tree limbs, the wood grain on his writing desk functions as a prison. He stares at the design but cannot find poetic meaning in it. He tries on several comparisons and metaphors but none satisfy. If Stavros has lost his poetic voice, the Poet in this segment has lost his poetic vision—his ability to make concrete connections between things. The connections he does make are fleeting; even his feeble image of the old woman’s grimace is “there, then not there, then there again.” (115). In this layer of the poem, Levis has the narrator step outside the text and become the Poet in order to comment on the nature of writing and of poetic vision. He metafictively calls attention to the poem itself: “Poverty is what happens at the end of any story, including this one, / When there are too many stories” (103-4). Mark Halliday has also noted the poem’s metafictional comment on poetry itself:

The poetry is suffused with awareness that the poet won’t last, the reader won’t last, and the appreciation anyone gets in life will never be enough, and thus the ultimate sublime efficacy of poetry will have to come—if it comes at all—in a fabulously tenuous and threatened spiritual life beyond the life of the poet who breathed and walked (Halliday 89-90).

The problem of the failed poetic process becomes more serious here. Against late twentieth century nihilism the only defense had been the creation of art itself. If creativity fails or proves impoverished, there is nothing meaningful left. Halliday shows that the implications of the failed poetic process are a loss of meaning that even the artistic process cannot assuage. If poetry is meaningless, then the Poet is meaningless and there is no remedy for it.

In this segment Levis renders the change in perspective by using a rhythm less orderly, and diction less poetic, than the speaker’s segment in the beginning of the poem. The Poet’s voice is also much more desperate and less elegiac than the speaker’s. D.W. Fenza observes that Levis’s poems often “turn prosaic, antipoetic” (Fenza 14), in order to serve his aesthetic goals. That technique succeeds here by rendering the Poet’s failed poetic vision which he confesses at the end of this segment: “is [the wood grain] the place where the comparisons, the little comforts / …give way beneath us?” (116-17). For the Poet the comparisons and little comforts are the very words in the poem he is writing which can no longer bear the weight of meaninglessness resulting from his lost poetic vision.

The Poet’s perspective carries over into the next segment of the poem with increased velocity. He describes his failing creativity in the image of the angel fasting within him. Here the Poet also relates poetry to prophecy through the angel that signifies poetic inspiration connected to the holy or divine. But within the Poet the angel is starved so thin that he can no longer sense its presence or its departure. In this image the Poet also links himself with the Sibyl and the tangible furnishings inside her cage. The thimble of water is the well which had not evaporated in the Sibyl’s cage, but which dries up within the Poet. It symbolizes poetic inspiration—the memory, the voice and the vision that the speaker, Stavros and the Poet have lost, respectively. And each of these elements contributes to Levis’ elegy for the failed poetic process.

The swinging perch is the only evidence of the Sibyl’s remaining life, but this comes to rest within the Poet’s cage. The Poet laments his lost vision with almost violent resolve. In answer to his own question, “What do you do when nothing calls you anymore?” (118), the Poet replies:

I’m going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk

I’m bent over until it’s infinite,

I’m going to make it talk, I’m going to make it

Confess everything (125-28).

The Poet becomes imprisoned within the grain of wood in his writing desk, evoking once more the Sibyl’s own imprisonment and linking it with the creative task. The Poet longs for his lost poetic gift, commanding himself to stare at the wood until he can see some infinite meaning within its grain. This is the climax of the poem; the repeated first-person pronouns create a tone of urgency and even maniacal desperation.

Lastly, I believe the reader himself becomes the fourth contemporary sibylline character in the poem. After Levis uses portraits of the speaker, Stavros, and the Poet to reveal the failure of the poetic process, he places the same burden onto the reader’s shoulders, causing him or her to become sibylline as well. The direct address in the final lines draws the reader into the poem and the recurred images link the reader with the Sibyl. Earlier in the poem the sunlight had been a kind of audience for Stavros’ story. Here Levis repeats the imagery of the sunlight on the windows, but now the reader has become like the audience of Stavros’ seemingly endless story.

The final short segment of the poem is enigmatic in several ways. Structurally, it is broken into two one-line stanzas, the second indented as if it were an extension of the first line. This suggests a certain weight and finality that is yet unsure of itself. The poem’s ending is far from resolute and Levis renders that irresolution in the structure of the last segment. Grammatically, the last sentence lacks final punctuation. Again Levis mechanically renders the poem’s confessed artistic failure. Thematically, the final segment is enigmatic because it places the reader in the position of the Sibyl.

In an effective framing device the speaker recalls the letter and sleeping cat details from the first segment of the poem. I believe the poem itself is the letter and the reader, its addressee. The iron grillwork into which the speaker passes the letter visually evokes once more the bars of the Sibyl’s cage. The reader stands behind that iron grillwork as the recipient of the letter. In the final line of the poem, the speaker passes the letter “into the irretrievable” (136). The poem is “irretrievable” because it has become a part of the reader. No longer an isolated art object, the poem breaks out of its cage of text and enters the reader. Now that the reader has received the poem, he or she becomes responsible for its continuation. Here again Levis suggests the relationship between poetry and prophecy. Just as prophets are held divinely accountable for the accurate delivery of their prophecy, so must poets bear the same responsibility. The lack of punctuation at the end of this final line also mimics the unending fate of the Sibyl. The poem does not end for the reader, and that incompletion forces the reader to examine his or her own loss.

As Halliday shows, “the beauty of the [opening] passage comes from the way his imagination does touch each of the things he ‘cannot touch’ in their disappearance” (Halliday 95). Those things the contemporary sibylline characters have lost—a connection to the past, the poetic voice and vision—are all to be found in Levis’ “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage.” The strength of this poem is that it accomplishes its aesthetic and thematic goals so underhandedly. In an elegy lamenting the failure of the poetic process, Levis actually succeeds in creating a poetic masterpiece.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the Cumaean Sibyl says: “but, though I change till eye would never know me, my voice shall live, the fates will leave my voice” (Ovid 388). The Sibyl’s failure in the prophetic process resulted in a timeless story whose resonances have far outlived the words written on scattered leaves at the entrance to her cave. In the same way, Levis’ confessed failure actually accomplishes that which it laments to have lost, reestablishing confidence in the poetic method for both the reader and the poet. The poem is an elegy that brings to life the subject of its mourning—the poetic method.

Bibliography

Dixon-Kennedy, Mike. Encyclopedia of Greco-Roman Mythology. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO,

1998. NetLibrary

Lindahl, Carl, John McNamara, John Lindow. Ed. Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of

myths, legends, tales, beliefs, and customs. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2000.

NetLibrary

Ovid. Metamorhposes. Horace Gregory, Translator and Introduction. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Halliday, Mark. "Levis and All Loss." Chicago Review. 45.1 (1999): 89-97.

Fenza, D. W. "The Wish to Be Swept Clean: The Poetry of Larry Levis." American Poetry

Review. 31.2 (2002): 11-17.

Sullivan, Richard A. "The Sibyl and the Voice: Eliot's Epigraphs to The Waste Land." Yeats

Eliot Review: A Journal of Criticism and Scholarship. 7.1-2 (1982): 19-27.

Campbell, Elizabeth A. "The Woman Artist as Sibyl: Sappho, George Eliot, and Margaret

Atwood." The Nassau Review: The Journal of Nassau Community College Devoted to

Arts, Letters, and Sciences. 5.5 (1989): 6-14.

Levis, Larry. “Elegy With a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage” The Selected Levis. Selected and

with an Afterword by David St. John. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2003.

[1] I will cite this source as “MF” for the remainder of this paper

2008-03-21T10:40:00.000-07:00

“Pocket Wonderlands”: Significant Moments of Aesthetic Appreciation

an essay on Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory

With a similar potential for misapprehension as Nabokov’s “inclination to equate in retrospect [his] age with that of the century” (13), the reader is inclined to equate his novel Speak, Memory with that of an account of Russia at the turn of the century. The book appears also to be about Nabokov’s life. But what Nabokov has cleverly disguised as a personal memoir is actually an aesthetic exploration of the nature of beauty, especially as it relates to memory. Each chapter is a kind of butterfly hunt (indiscriminate of season or species) for a rare and beautiful specimen worthy of induction into Nabokov’s elaborate collection. In his collection are the moments of aesthetic appreciation that retain a certain significance through the process of memory. The hunt for these is the eager occupation of each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence. Nabokov hunts with the net of memory, and pins his Lepidoptera with elegant style. That is not to say that Nabokov’s prose is dead, for even on the corkboard, his moments of aesthetic beauty come to life. Speak, Memory is Nabokov’s eloquent recollection of those “momentary vacuum[s] into which rushes all that [he] love[s]” (139). For Nabokov memory, beauty and aesthetics are intrinsically linked and arriving at their junction becomes the project of his autobiography.

Nabokov skillfully uses the aesthetic technique of relating the memories of a (however prodigious) child through the lens of a mature adult artist. Nabokov confesses to this technique: “I like to fold my magic carpet [of time], after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another” (139). He superimposes the experience of half a century upon a child’s appreciation of such trivial moments as hiding behind a divan: “it was the primordial cave…that lay behind the games I played when I was four” (23). This technique accomplishes a retrospective significance and attaches a psychological depth to each memory he relates.

Episodes in his earliest years, like the one with Kuropatkin’s matches, provide symbolic and thematic material that a child of such an age could not have understood, but that Nabokov claims to have sensed. And now he articulates the thematic material through his autobiography. Seemingly trivial moments of the past retain a beauty and weight that unfolds later with the end of the thematic strand. Sometimes, as in the case of Nabokov’s first captured (and escaped) butterfly, the strand “dip[s] and dodg[es] and soar[s]” (120) for forty years before it is caught. Nabokov claims that the true purpose of autobiography should be “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life” (27). And if the thematic design of matches (rather than Kuropatkin’s evasion of Soviet imprisonment) is indeed “the point”, then the reader has early been warned of Nabokov’s intended emphasis: the autobiography will focus on rectangles of framed sunlight (119), meerschaum penholders (151), and unprojected film slides (162). These visual metaphors illumine the autobiography’s emphasis on the beautiful particulars. The small, detailed things provide a perspective into something grand and beautiful, which is exactly his desire for Speak, Memory. In the beautiful particulars we find the “intrinsically artistic…meeting place between imagination and knowledge” (167), where Nabokov dwells with reverence.

The first of these perspectival images is the rectangle of framed sunlight in the window which had disclosed the day’s weather and, therefore, its suitability for a butterfly hunt. Nabokov could deduce by that strip of light whether the day would be sullen or brilliant. The next symbolic object is a souvenir Nabokov acquired at Biarritz, a “meerschaum penholder with a tiny peephole of crystal in its ornamental part” (151). Inside the peephole one could see a “miraculous photographic view” of a lighthouse scene, but only after getting rid of the “shimmer of one’s own lashes” (151). The third visual symbol is that of the unprojected Magic-Lantern slide Lenski had used for instructive readings. Nabokov remarks that the slides had looked “tawdry and tumid” when projected on the screen, but when “simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light”, they had revealed a particular loveliness (166). It is in the detailed particulars that Nabokov finds beauty and meaning.

However in Speak, Memory Nabokov does not often explain the beauty and meaning of the detailed particulars and thematic strands. He even confesses occasional ignorance; he admits that with one “marble” of aesthetic appreciation, he “still seem[s] to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not knowing exactly where to fit it” (152). Instead he relates the moment with a crafted style that both installs the reader into Nabokov’s childhood and awakens his or her own catalogue of memories. Thus, part of Nabokov’s project is to appeal to the very human (and specifically childlike) apprehension of the beautiful particulars and to mourn the “astounding” fact of “how little the ordinary person notices butterflies” (129). These are the real treasures of human memory and history, which “as if an evil spell had been cast on the Adriatic coast” (130) are so easily overshadowed by generalities (Russia, Soviet literature). In awakening these treasures in the reader he implicitly asks him or her to consider the significance of (and relationship between) memory, beauty, and aesthetics. He does not overburden with explanations; nor is he nostalgic and sentimental during his childhood reminiscences. For Nabokov the apprehension of the beautiful particulars is a serious endeavor; the moment of significant memory is the very seed of art, out of which grows everything beautiful and full of life.

Nabokov’s autobiography attempts to diminish the generalities to particulars, and to peer into the beautiful particulars where there are wonderlands of meaning and significance. At their meeting place is the point of aesthetic beauty which is Nabokov’s intended destination. And he will travel land and sea, across Russia and the United States, in order to catch and catalogue that butterfly. The anthem of Speak, Memory: “How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!”(24).

2008-03-10T12:15:00.000-07:00

Magician’s Tricks

What about when I’m lost for words?
When the fearful heart you’ve made
plays no music. And silent chords
trickle from trumpet to the grave;
trees tremble for the song of birds.

Is there beauty in what isn’t?
A quiet mind, soul and spirit
can do more than slick magician
tricks of words, pen and paper wit.

Apocrypha is blessing to
ears that hear only soft, sweet songs
which sail like fragrant ocean views.

The quiet wind, blowing words hard
will quiet my winding, fleshy heart.

Still the voice of stillness speaks, “Come.”

11/01/06

This Morning I Chased The Sunrise

2008-01-08T07:33:00.000-08:00

This morning I chased the Sunrise. Unscrewing the Venetian blinds to survey the weather, I was assaulted with a colorful spray across the sky. Flamingo pinks and night-light oranges throbbed in the moguls of clouds on the Eastern horizon. I grabbed my coffee mug, flung my hood over my cold ears, and braved the early suburban outdoors. I walked quickly, urgently toward the scene. A woman stood motionless on her porch, staring in the direction of my pilgrimage. The skyline is a daze, a confusion. An almost violent explosion of unnecessary beauty, grandeur. I had been reading about Queen Esther, about Mordecai’s honored procession through the city on the back of the king’s horse, trailing the king’s robe behind him. This is how the king honors those who delight him. Miles above me, last night’s late-coming clouds trail the king’s watercolor robe behind them, in a seemingly depthless procession. The train of it fills the sky temple with glory. Atmospheric smoke surrounds.

The cold startles me out of this. I turn around, resolved to like beauty more. And the wool-thick clouds over the pacific ocean that had been a wet-cement grey several minutes ago have illuminated, as if by fragrant choirs of fuchsia tulips whose music and scent have been transposed into color, for those of us who see. This startles me once more, and my eyes are wide. I shake my head for the rest of the walk back to my front door, shake it at the superfluity of this drama. Over the top are you, sky, this morning. For some reason I feel unworthy to ingest any more of this beauty, and I stare at the sidewalk for the last few steps. But yesterday’s rain has left a long streak of puddle on the ground in front of me, whose reflection the tulip pink clouds overwhelm. It looks like someone has spilled a gluttonously large strawberry milkshake across the sidewalk. It adorns, on purpose, the grey cement with accidental beauty, just like the sky above me.

The Raw World Text

2008-01-05T08:42:00.000-08:00

Allow me to share with you an excerpt from Annie Dillard's "Living By Fiction" which I finished this morning.

"Can we not loose the methods of literary criticism upon the raw world? May we not analyze the breadth of our experience? We can and may--but only if we first consider the raw world as a text, as a meaningful, purposefully fashioned creation, as a work of art. For we have seen that critics interpret artifacts only. Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial filmmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer...

This, clearly, would be a religious, even creationist, reading of the universe. Note how it differs from pantheism. It reads the universe as a significant art object, not as part of a stream of being which includes the observer, and not as personal message. Pantheism is not the only meaningful reading of the natural world. One need not find a spirit in each bush and rock for these things to mean. The bush and rock may be, as it were, literary symbols. But of what? If we could only see the first draft, or locate some letters!" (Dillard 144).

"The Strangest Christmas Eve's Eve"

2007-12-24T11:03:00.000-08:00

The Strangest Christmas Eve's Eve

It’s 7:30pm and I am already in my bed. There’s no one here to talk to, except myself and my roommate’s cactus named Hugo. Today I awoke, drank some coffee and wrote a story, ran around the cold, trashy neighborhood, and made lunch. After lunch, I—Well, I’m not really sure. I read, I think. Then I watched my Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer film alone and laughed very hard at Yukon Cornelius whenever he licked his pickax. I had some cereal for dinner and a date (the fruit).

The fog is my only company, besides Jesus, but he’s busy getting ready to get born from a virgin’s womb. I’m packed already, for I am traveling to Ireland tomorrow to see my father. I am more lonely than I expected. I think about people with no family, no home. In the house next to mine, the burglar alarm has been going off since this morning. I called the University Security, who knocked on my door and told me they can do nothing since it is a privately owned house. They asked me if I had knocked on the house’s door…to do what? Get their attention? “Um, excuse me, your alarm is going off. I guess you didn’t hear it.”

I asked one of the officers what the number for the real police was.

He said, “It’s five five five five five. You can remember that, can’t you, Cowboy?”

“I’ll try,” I replied. They left, and though they mocked me for being a concerned American, I still appreciated the company. I changed socks twice, just for excitement. It is possible that I might have cut my hair this morning, though that could very well have been yesterday. Who can tell? I also tried dancing in my room since no one else is around. It was less than graceful.

There is so much bad news in the world. I watch sentimental Christmas movies and they mean something to me, they really do. And yet I have this weight, this burden of evil which passes through my mind like the steaming buses outside my front door. There goes another. People are hurting—so badly. And I remember why Christmas came in the first place. Salt on the wounds of a bleeding earth.

Who will stand up and say this world is not in need of something very big, very powerful? Who will do it? Go ahead, stand up. Who will continue to convince themselves that they can do this all on their own? Just make it through, comrade. Just live one more day, that’s all there is. Really. Really?

Really?

Or we can follow the star in the sky to the manger and give rich, gifts, fit for a king to a little baby. Think about the awesome humility of God. Just think about it for one minute. Trusting himself to the womb of a teenager sleeping in a stable. Listen to the incredible message in this miracle. God is in the loneliest, darkest, dirtiest places, on his way to redeem the world.

And I may be in a lonely, dark, dirty place right now, but this is right where he has placed me. “Merry Christmas Eve's Eve, Dylan.” I’m okay with that.

December 23, 2006

Welcome Mr. and Mrs. Ostini

2007-12-09T22:59:00.000-08:00

I have the pleasure of hosting the infamous Mr. and Mrs. Ostini in my Sacramento house this week. We will be carrying on and cornholing all over this, God's favorite city. Look out Northern California!

You have Jury Duty

2007-12-06T15:47:00.000-08:00

Note to self: You have Jury Duty Wednesday, January 23.

Dylan

1337

2007-12-03T22:25:00.000-08:00

I wrote a History final this evening, in spite of the soft breeze and the unseasonal sound of crickets throbbing in the bushes outside my classroom. I entered the fluorescent lights, and I wrote the final.

Raise your hand if you have academic integrity. Raise your hand if you appreciate any part of the work your professors pour into your life. Raise your hand if you care...

I wrote for almost two hours tracing the level of freedom in the development of network technology.

My thesis: Though it would appear that with the development of network technology has come a steadily increasing level of freedom, I believe that in fact the contemporary Internet is less free than its early ancestors such as SAGE and ARPANET. However, the liberality of the technology itself does not necessarily coincide with the freedom of the user.

The Internet began as an entirely open technology. But somewhere along the way it became closed.

So there are the Open Source Movement dudes who bemoan this diminution of liberality. And there are the corporates who still claim that the technology is essentially "free."

But my architecture friend Ryan recently told me a maxim that has not left my mind: "Design comes from Constraint".

When an architect is asked to build a museum, he is essentially paralyzed unless some constraints are placed upon him. These include: climate, geography, population, historical setting, urbanity, etc. When once she determines these constraints, she can then design. Design comes from constraint.

The Law is Freedom?

Gravity literally makes the world go 'round, I think.

So in my Final I argue that though the technology itself is less free today than it was in its early stages, this diminution of liberality has actually benefited the average user. Network Technology cannot have its anarchistic cake and eat it too. If the universality of the Internet depends on the steepness of its learning curve, which itself depends on its illiberality, then the network architects must choose between these two ideals, or at least strike a balance.

As for me:

"For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again." 2 Corinthians 5:14

F.I.N.A.L.S.

2007-12-03T09:01:00.001-08:00

Fun
Is
Not
Always
Literary
Speculation

Imlac on the Pyramids

2007-12-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

"But for the pyramids, no reason has ever been given adequate to the cost and labor of the work. The narrowness of the chambers proves that it could afford no retreat from enemies, and treasures might have been reposited at far less expense with equal security. It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some employment. Those who have already all that they can enjoy must enlarge their desires. He that has built for use till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity, and extend his plan to the utmost power of human performance, that he may not be soon reduced to form another wish.

I consider this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king, whose power is unlimited, and whose treasure surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life by seeing thousands laboring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another.

Whoever thou art, that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the pyramids, and confess thy folly!"

- Samuel Johnson's Rasselas

The Difference Between Me and You

2007-12-02T07:13:00.000-08:00

Is if I could count the sand
on a thousand seashores,
I still could not hold the scores
of music’s heart in my hand.

And if I could wake the sun
with one word from my mouth,
I still could not ask the clouds
to dance for a lonely someone.

And if I could feed sparrows
with bags of store-bought grain,
I still could not explain
their song through darkened windows.

And if I could trace the feet
of every human pace
I still could not name the place
where walking and dancing meet.

And if I could heal disease
with microwaves and knives,
I still could not save the life
taken by love’s reckless need.

But you can.

Sexy Cyborgs

2007-11-30T09:13:00.000-08:00

For Donna Haraway, a cyborg is both “…a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 191). But her vision for the former has been lost in the prolific deviation of the latter. As a creature of social reality, Haraway envisions the cyborg as a liberating cultural phenomenon which blurs the lines between human and machine. This line-blurring serves as an analog for the kind of ideological shift she envisions regarding other social and cultural boundaries, specifically those of gender . But as a creature of fiction, the cyborg has in many ways reinforced the opposite of her vision. In her essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and the Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Haraway claims that “…the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 191). Far from an optical illusion, the boundary between the representation of women in science fiction and social reality has become more defined, more deeply ingrained in American culture. In this paper I will investigate the rift between Donna Haraway’s optimistic prophecy of cyborg potential for feminist liberation and the sexist representation of women in science fiction media and popular culture.

Haraway shows that in the modern world, three crucial borders have been breached: that between human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and nonphysical (Haraway 193-5). She celebrates this border erasure as progress towards such an erasure of the borders between male and female gender stereotypes. Chela Sandoval adds that “…cyborg consciousness can be understood as the technological embodiment of a particular and specific form of oppositional consciousness,” (Sandoval 408). In other words, the modern cyborg era has ushered in a challenging of power structures and hierarchies. Haraway believes the cyborg has the power to deconstruct the phallogocentric idols that have towered over Western culture. But under the tyrannical shadow of popular culture, this potentiality is as yet unrealized. Instead, the cyborg has taken two deviant paths.

The first digression from Haraway’s hope for the cyborg is the “posthuman” isolation and dependence on technology. Haraway herself exposes the negative aspects surrounding the development of the cyborg in the technological workplace:

“…[M]any women’s lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating child care, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age” (Haraway 208).

Rather than being liberated by the example of the cyborg, women are often oppressed by these technologies. As technology develops, workers in the electronic sector become increasingly dependent on the machines. This leads to the threat of dehumanization which has existed since the early Industrial age. Although Haraway celebrates the blurring of the lines between human and machine, she also recognizes that the fusion between the two can sometimes be ugly.

The other great divergence is in the gendering of female cyborgs in science fiction and popular culture. This is the failed realization of Haraway’s cyborg potential on which I want to focus. Haraway shows that “Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs” (Haraway 191), but the role of the female cyborg is blatantly stereotyped. Haraway says, “[t]here is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices” (Haraway 197). But this anti-essentialist philosophy is certainly not supported by the generalizations of the female cyborg in science fiction. The gendering of the female cyborg in science fiction consists in two common representations: she is sexy and seductive. There are prolific examples of this masculinist representation in many types of science fiction media, but predominantly in cinema and television.

In the 1982 Ridley Scott film, Blade Runner, the three main “replicant” (cyborg) female characters—Rachel, Pris, and Zhora—are portrayed as powerfully seductive. They are often scantily clad with heavy make-up. This theme appears in other films as well, such as the comedy, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery in which a gang of killer “fembots” attacks the hero. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the antagonist T-X is played by model Kristianna Loken. Another example of this representation is in the 2004 film, The Stepford Wives, which is an adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel of the same name (Wikipedia).

In television, the pattern of the “sexy cyborg” continues. Ronald D. Moore’s modern reworking of Battlestar Galactica features several examples of this pattern. Supermodel Tricia Helfer plays the character, “Number 6” a blond, seductive member of the Humanoid Cylon race. Gene Roddenbury’s Star Trek: The Next Generation gives yet another instance of the gendering of the sexy female in the form of the character “Seven of Nine” played by Jeri Ryan (Wikipedia).

I find the names of several of these characters revealing as well. The names, “T-X”, “Number 6”, and “Seven of Nine” convey a sense of the dehumanization of the characters. If cyborgs are both cybernetic and organic, these names align the female characters much more with their cybernetic, rather than their organic, heritage.

Interestingly, the writers and creators of these media are almost exclusively male. As Anne Elliot says in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, “…the pen has been in their hands” (Austen 220), and the story told by these writers is a far cry from Haraway’s vision for the cyborg. In each of these examples the fusion of biological female with cybernetic technology consistently produces a sexually powerful, seductive, and manipulative female image. This is the allocation for female cyborg characters. Whether good or bad, heroine or villainess, these gendered qualities remain.

We are left with a rift between the social reality of female cyborgs in the electronic sector and the science fiction representation of female cyborgs in cinema and television. In American culture, this gap has become so entrenched that Haraway’s optimistic vision for their liberating potential seems unattainable. In 1989, at the time of Haraway’s “Manifesto”, there had already been plenty of the same gender representation in popular culture. However, it seems that her optimism for the cyborg transcends these sexist portrayals in cinema and television and that she values the erasure of the borders between human and machine over the side effect of masculinist representation of women in science fiction. She believes that “…there are also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self” (Haraway 216). For Haraway, these riches surpass the sexist stereotypes embedded in the culture of science fiction film and television.

I believe that the representation of women in science fiction is more dangerous than Haraway anticipates in her “Manifesto”. While the blurring of the lines between human and machine does serve as a powerful analog for the erasure of the boundary between male and female, the representation of women in science fiction has created a powerfully regressive force. In addition to the transgressed boundaries, the new technology of the cyborg has also produced a sexist cultural icon, exemplified by the aforementioned female characters. Instead of standing out as progressive emblems in popular culture, the cyborg often falls in line with the stereotypical gendering of women in the media, contributing to their already too prevalent sexist misrepresentation.

If Haraway’s optimism for the cyborg’s liberating potential is ever to be realized, her dream of a “…powerful infidel heteroglossia” (Haraway 223) must also consist in the subversion of gender roles in contemporary science fiction and popular culture. As Haraway says, “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (Haraway 217). In Marxist terms, the cyborg must take over the means of production—that is, in this case, the means of information.

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and the Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Feminism/Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. pp. 190-223.

Sandoval, Chela. “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed.”The Cyborg Handbook. Gray, Chris Hables, editor. New York: Routledge, 1995. pp. 407-421.

"Cyborgs in Fiction." Wikipedia. 2007. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.. 1 Nov 2007 .

rat

2007-11-29T10:41:00.000-08:00

the days are windy

2007-11-28T07:44:00.000-08:00

I like windy days the best...

they make it seem like the world is going to end any minute.>

The Secret of the Great Pyramid

2007-11-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

Of the seven wonders of the world, the Great Pyramid of Khufu is perhaps the most wonderful. For centuries it has been the source of countless investigations, mysteries, new age theories, and even astronomical discoveries. There is much myth surrounding this amazing establishment, and archaeologists and astronomers alike are baffled by its complexity and the methodology of its construction. In recent investigations, discoveries suggest the ancient Egyptians may have known much more about astronomy than we had previously believed.

Aside from all metaphysical speculations, the Great Pyramid remains one of the most brilliant structures in the world. Archaeologists still do not know how it was built. The pyramid is in Giza, about 16 kilometers from Cairo, and at 484.9 feet, it was the tallest structure in the world before the Eiffel Tower was built. It is comprised of over two million limestone slabs, each weighing upwards of two or three tons (Fernie).1

The first inquiry into the pyramid’s mystique took place in the ninth century when Al-mamun set out to discover the wealth rumored to be hidden inside the pyramid. The north entrance was so well hidden, Al-mamun and his men were forced to break in by shattering each limestone brick. They stumbled upon a fascinating aspect of the pyramid called the Descending Passage. This tunnel goes straight from the north entrance and slopes slightly downward underneath the pyramid (Fernie). The incredible thing about this tunnel is that it is almost exactly straight. Of course, this fact astonished Al-mamun even as it astonishes us today. How could the Egyptians, without modern tools, have constructed a tunnel with such perfection? This question was so puzzling, that in 1881, a surveyor named Flinders Petrie visited the pyramid to measure its exactness. Using the most modern tools of that time, Petrie discovered the greatest margin of error over the one hundred meter tunnel was a mere seven millimeters (Fernie). This level of perfection has sparked much interest for many astronomers. Some speculate that the Egyptians must have used unknown units of measurement to construct it. Others point to the stars. They note that if a person were to stand at the base of the tunnel and look towards the entrance, he or she would be looking out into the northern patch of the night sky. Currently, the pole star is Polaris, but as a result of what is known as “precession”, the Egyptians would have been looking at a different star entirely. This mystery still has not been solved.

Aside from the unique Descending Passage, astronomers have also been vexed by several other aspects of the Great Pyramid. A somewhat abstract example is the proportions of the pyramid. In the 1800’s, Astronomer Royal of Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth became intoxicated with this mystery. He discovered the ratio of the slant of the pyramid to be 10:9. He then took the height of the pyramid (484.9) and multiplied it by 10^9.This came out to be 91,840,000 miles, a number very close to the distance from the Earth to the Sun (Fernie). Many deem this purely coincidence, but Smyth was faithful in his belief that the product had much more significance. He believed that this meant the Egyptians must have known this distance.

Another example of the Egyptians’ curious knowledge of the heavens is the almost true perfection of the pyramid’s orientation along the sides. The east side of the pyramid lies only three arcminutes from the actual north-south line. Taking into consideration the immensity of the structure and the perfection of this measurement, it suffices to say the Egyptians must have had a good deal of knowledge about celestial poles. According to J. Donald Fernie, “This makes it virtually certain that some astronomical method was used to establish the local meridian” (Fernie). The Egyptians were brilliant enough to use this as a tool to orient the Great Pyramid.

It was noted that the orientation of the pyramids’ sides were slightly different for each. They were built over centuries of time, and astronomers believe that fact holds the key to the Egyptians’ methodology of orientation. In the year 2000, Egyptologist Kate Spence published a paper on her explanation for the pyramids. She said that the Egyptians used two stars to determine which way was north and then oriented the base of the pyramids using that point. She also “showed that the resulting orientation errors varied as a function of time—just as predicted by precession” (Fernie). Therefore, she argues the Egyptians used the stars in the sky to determine the location and direction of the most monumental construction in history.

Indeed the pyramids explain much about the Egyptians and their study of the universe. But more than that, they leave much more to be discovered and many questions to be answered. They are a source of mystery, even to this day. The more scientists learn about the Great Pyramid, the more they find they don’t know. But even with all the mystery and superstition surrounding, and perhaps polluting, the Great Pyramid, astronomers have discovered some concrete ideas about the studies of the Egyptians. First, scientists discovered the Descending Passage which led them to believe that the Egyptians may have used a polar star to build an almost perfectly straight tunnel. Later, Charles Piazzi Smythe discovered the ratio of the pyramids side was 10:9 and found a coincidence with the distance from the earth to the sun. Also, astronomers examined the orientation of the sides of the bases of the pyramids and discovered they must have used the celestial poles in their construction. These were all fascinating discoveries, but none entirely concrete. The mystery surrounding the “scientific” explanations has not net been dissolved.

It is interesting to think that the Egyptians, one of the most innovative civilizations in history, used the stars as guides in every aspect of their lives. Whether it was in the worship of deity, agriculture, or construction, astronomy played a central role in Egyptian society. The Great Pyramid is a perfect example of the ingenuity of the Egyptian civilization and will continue to puzzle astronomers for years to come.

1 This and all other information and quotations are taken from

Fernie, J. Donald. "Astronomy and the Great Pyramid." American

Scientist September 2004. 24 May 2005

"This Is Where I Live"

2007-11-21T10:16:00.000-08:00

I stepped onto the tile checkerboard landing of my apartment, shielded from the changing wind by the cement archway above my head. I fumbled in my pocket, aware of several forming holes in the cloth, searching for my key. Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder and brought the key to its home in the green door. The glass window revealed darkened shapes and colors inside, indefinitely. I turned the key. Nothing happened. It fit in the slot, but didn’t turn. I narrowed my eyes a little, confused. I backed up two or three steps, craned my stiff neck and checked the number on the top of the gray wall. It read, 95 Cranbrook. This is where I live. I only have one house key, this makes no sense. The thin green door was the same, the checkerboard landing was the same. I tried the key again. Nothing. I looked over my shoulder once more. This is England, this is where I live. Frustrated, I turned and walked back onto the path. Along the row of apartments the yellow street lamps dimly lit patches of familiar ground. The number fifteen bus grumbled past, estranged faces peering through the dirty glass. They could tell I don’t belong here. But I couldn’t. This is where I live. As I walked down the street, I looked down at my black shoes—they had carried me this far. There is a dark brick hallway between every two or three apartments. I tried one of them, blocked by a tall, wooden door with a metal latch. It opened and I stepped into even greater darkness. The night was settling in to a windy sleep and I latched the bolt to keep it from making too much noise. In the windless hallway, I could hear my footsteps ring against the walls. The invisible ceiling came into light as I continued onto the cobblestone paths which run behind the apartments, the apartments where I live. I circled around to the back of number ninety-five, glancing through the branches of small trees bordering the parking lot. In the red brick inlet between ninety-five and ninety-three, I approached the back door. Again I reached for my key. The cold slowed my hands. I put the key into the keyhole of the apartment where I live. Once more, it entered, but hesitated. I pushed on the heavy door keeping me from the place where I live. This is strange. I knocked softly on the door. All of the lights were off in the kitchen and the dining room. I heard footsteps from within. I backed up from the door. I didn’t want to frighten my roommates. Out of the corner of my eye, a face and an inquisitive hand drew the curtain, and let it fall again. A few seconds later, the door opened slowly.

“Can I help you?” asked someone I had never seen before.

“I…is this ninety-five Cranbrook?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered distrustfully.

“Oh. Right.”

“Is anything wrong?” she asked.

I didn’t know what to say. Yes something is wrong. This is where I live.

“Is Maxine home?”

“Maxine? I don’t know a Maxine.”

“Oh…okay.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m—" the wind picked up. I said a name, but neither of us heard it.

“Are you alright?” she asked, becoming noticeably frustrated.

“Yes, I think so. It’s just…I live here.” I said, looking at the dirty ground. This is my trash can. This is where I live.

“Sorry?” she asked.

I stepped backwards and looked at the window to my room in the apartment. This is the room where I live. I walked over to the large glass pane encased by the new, white painted wood. I peered inside. I recognized nothing. I have things. I have a bookshelf and a bed. There was nothing in the room.

“Can I help you?” asked the girl leaning hesitantly out from the warm kitchen. I didn’t answer. This is where I live. I turned back around to face her. The wind picked up a pile of leaves like a greedy child and threw them up into a swirl. The dust and the cold were uncomfortable. I want to go home, I want to go to my home. I walked back past the girl. She stared right at me as I passed her.

“This is ninety-five Cranbrook,” I said. “This is where I live.”

I looked at my brown shoes as I walked away from that apartment, across the cobblestone path, past the small trees, and into the empty parking lot. Rain began to fall lightly, playfully. I turned up my collar a little, bitterly cold but reluctant to the fashion. I glanced back at the crooked white numbers above the kitchen window in the back of my apartment. 95. This is where I live.

The rain was only visible in the beam of dull light falling from the tall lampposts. There was nobody in sight. “I’m—" The wind picked up again and silenced my name as it fell from my lips and landed next to my white shoes which rested cautiously on the swimming, pot-holed parking lot cement.

Freerice.com

2007-11-20T12:27:00.001-08:00

Rice for children in need + Vocabulary Improvement = Brilliance

clipped from freerice.com

Free Rice - For Each Word You Get Right, We Donate 10 Grains of Rice through the United Nations to Help End World Hunger

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"Ta Ta Tue"

2007-11-20T11:08:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered what Robotic Science/Human Psychology Graduate students from Bangladesh sing about? Here are some pictures of my friend Al-Amin and I singing a traditional Bangoli children's song together. He taught me the lyrics and melody. A rough translation of the chorus: "Every day my heart is dancing. Who is dancing? -- Ta ta tue tue..."

"Ta Ta Tue" is the sound of the Tabla, an Eastern drum that is pretty Rock and Roll. Think of it as in the Little Drummer Boy's "Pa rum pa pum pum".

Al-Amin is currently doing research on human-robot symbiosis. So, if you want to be on the winning side of the Robot revolution, visit his Web Site and learn to your human heart's content.

He and I had several discussions about his work in Robotics. I delicately raised the question of Science Fiction's 's prophecies regarding the development of Artificial intelligence. "Will we be enslaved by Robots as they become smarter than us?"

No.

But why not? Al-Amin told me that Robots are machines governed by a program. For my technologically limited understanding, this was as far as I could go. But the fact that a robot acts only as commanded by its programmer made sense.

And that's why I decided that although Al-Amin serves fruit garnished with salt, he was a good friend. A good friend with a sweet voice and a Robotic dog that knows how I'm feeling.