Valediction v Conjoined: On Onions and Earthquakes......???

John Donne's poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and Judith Minty's poem "Conjoined" present two radically different standpoints on love, one of the most complicated of human emotions. Each author uses metaphors, especially in reference to nature, as well as tone to convey their attitude of wonder and antagonism, respectively.

Both poems are carried on strong metaphors, which serve to convey the author's emotions towards love. Many of these metaphors refer to nature to give them their strength. For example, in Donne's poem, he states, "Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears; men reckon what it did and meant; But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent." Here he speaks of an earthquake, which has the ultimate power of upheaval, and can cause so much damage to property and lives. He goes on to say, "So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move..." Again he refers to huge natural disasters, floods and winds specifically; they have the power of so much destruction, and yet at the same time in their power they can be beautiful. Love, he says, is destructive and great and to be feared, but at the same time, to be respected; it awes those who experience it. It takes two separate people and brings them together into one existential sort of existence, adding both personalities and making them better.

In stark contrast, Judith Minty's poems use metaphors in reference to completely unnatural things. Beginning by declaring it "a marriage poem," Minty compares love to "the onion in my cupboard, a monster, actually two joined undre one transparent skin..." and "an accident, like the two-headed calf rooted in one body, fighting to suck at its mother's teats..." The poem is comprised entirely of metaphors, all of which ares trengthened by the fact that they are incredibly disturbing. Minty's take on love is probably just the opposite of what one would expect to see in "a marriage poem"; she makes it seem unnatural, and detrimental to both parties. With the onion metaphor, she paints a picture of two individuals, thrown together into a marriage. As they grow they grow on each other, lean on each other, and change from two individuals to one misshapen "monster": "each half-round, then flat and deformed where it pressed and grew against the other." The marriage she speaks of is a lose-lose situation, in which both partners begin to deform into something ugly and oppressed. Where John Donne says "Our souls... are one" with all the love and tenderness in the world, she argues that this oneness is terrible and monstrous, and unnatural.

The tone of each poem also works to convey the attitudes of the authors towards that elusive emotion. In John Donne's poem, a wondrous sort of tone permeates his narration, as he speaks of the vast wonders of nature that make it so incredible, and then compares them to love. Lines such as "Thy firmness draws my circle just, and makes me end where I begun" carry a sweet air in them, giving the love he portrays a heavy and yet light aspect at the same time, making it seem beautiful in all ways that nature could allow, and especially so in its disasterous flaws. However, Judith Minty points out the flaws and argues that they are what makes love ugly and harmful to those enthralled in it. This tone is carried through the entire poem in the disturbing imagery of two-headed calves and Siamese twins, stuck together all their lives, "doomed to live, even make love together for sixty years." She uses harsh words, like "monster", "deformed", "accident", and even "kill", all of which carry very negative connotations and bring visions of terror and unhappiness. She gives the overall effect of a dark tone, condescending in a way and looking down upon those who do not understand the detrimental nature of love: "...Men don't slice onions in the kitchen, seldom see what is invisible. " She finally closes with a line that rings of finality and drips menace in every word: "We cannot escape each other." In the end, separation is impossible, and Minty hints at a miserable eternity of oppression. The tones of these two poems--awe versus an almost hostility--mirror the revolutionary opposite ideas of the two poets regarding love.

Each poet has his/her own strong opionions when it comes to love. According to John Donne, it is a wondrous thing and should be respected. According to Judith Minty, however, it should simply be avoided if both sides of the relationship wish to keep their identities and individuality; if not, they will grow deformed and warped.

More O'Brien!

There's been one semi-formed question floating around in my head the entire time I've been reading this novel--is Tim O'Brien telling us what happened to him in Vietnam, or is he telling a story?

Jim Neilson, in his article "The Truth in Things: Personal Trauma as Historical Amnesia in The Things They Carried," brings postmodernism into the mix. Knew it was going to get thrown in there again somewhere.

When I take the chance to think about it--sure, The Things They Carried is a very postmodern novel. It is a "fragmented narrative," as Neilson puts it, which is basically everything postmodernism believes in. And O'Brien adds in plenty of doubt for the reader, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, as I've already pointed out.

Donald Ringnalda states that "the belief that we can distinguish between stories and reality is 'the very reason we got into and waged the Vietnam War.' " After all of these ponderings (as I began the article, I'll admit), this statement kind of blew me away. It's very fierce. I'd love to explore this a little bit in a piece of writing; I feel like there's a lot to say on the subject. Why O'Brien feels like he needs to blur these lines--which parts are, in the context of the narrative itself, truthful--why you can't necessarily tell that they're truthful--just all of that. It's exciting.

Neilson then goes on to argue about the way that The Things They Carried, just like all other literature about the Vietnam War, glorifies the Americans and dehumanizes the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese people suffered tremendous losses during the war--more than most people would initially assume--casualties past the one million mark. The Americans dropped "over 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam..." and yet the novel portrays "dehumanizing and racist attitudes towards the Vietnamese."

The exception to this--as immediately popped into my mind, as I read this--is the chapter, "The Man I Killed." I think this chapter is where the book really started to hit me. Maybe all our lives we've been taught in our history classes that the Vietnamese were the bad guys, but, sure, as we get older and start to understand the world a little more, we realize those millions of casualties were people just like us--sad, innocent people. Dead people. Dead people who used to have lives and families, and who used to eat and sleep and laugh and smile. O'Brien--or at least his character in the novel--realizes this in this chapter, as he stares down at the man he killed. It's a painful thing, and I think that emotion carries through the entire narrative, fragmented as it may be. Maybe O'Brien does inadvertantly or anyhow "dehumanize" the Vietnamese, but I think once anyone reads this chapter, that's what they'll remember, not how "they are part of the countryside, 'blend[ing] in with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass.' " That's really kind of how I'm feeling about it.

The Things They Carried... so far

So here's what I've got so far...

As I've been reading through this book, I've noticed a lot of things that sort of tie it into this whole ambiguous postmodernism thing. And in a way, I feel like I should maybe not be thinking these things, because it's a whole new semester, and I would like to move past postmodernism and shift my focus to more of a contemporary type of deal--but there are many postmodern things about The Things They Carried, as I'm noticing them. For one, it's very self-aware: Tim O'Brien constantly states things like "This is true" (pg 67) and "This is one story I've never told before" (pg 39). In a way, O'Brien is tearing down those walls, between narrative and reader; every story has the feel of not a chapter in a book, but a living, breathing story, being told by a living and breathing storyteller, told directly to the reader, who is supposed to listen and take it for what it is, what it isn't, what it might be...

The whole subject of "truth" is a central (how funny, using the word "central," considering the fact that postmodernism is all about the total absence of a center...) theme behind postmodernism, and I would say it's also a predominant theme in The Things They Carried (at least, so far, and in my general observations). I guess the biggest example of this in the text is the whole story, "How To Tell a True War Story." And then the whole story proceeds to tell you just how impossible that is, or at least tries to: "A true war story is never moral... You can tell a true war story if it embarasses you... It's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen." I've been finding it really interesting, how O'Brien twists everything around so you're just not sure what he means and what he doesn't--is he writing about stuff that has actually happened to him, or is it fiction? Or is it a little of both?? I guess in that way it's all deconstructed, and such. It's not just a novel. I feel like I haven't gotten too deep into it yet, so that's all the insight I can really offer... I'm looking forward to analyzing it, though. I'm really liking this book so far.

what IS it?!

So when I saw this week's prompt, I kind of got a little excited. Finally, a discussion I felt I could get myself into... Maybe. "What is Postmodernism?" What a crazy question to ask--and there's not much of an answer, in my general opinion. So that's what I'm going with, I guess. Postmodernism for Beginners has taught us that reality is fragmented, and potentially different to each person. So the only explanation of postmodernism I could possibly give is what, exactly, it means to me, right?

And I've been complaining about that all semester, so now I've got a little bit of a chance to form coherent sentences and such out of it. Whew--take a deep breath, a sip of coffee, and let's get a move on.

I've kind of been getting the feeling that postmodernism is, in just a few words, an excuse to get out of anything--and maybe I don't have a whole lot of proof supporting that claim, but what is truth, anyway? What good does my truth do you, in the long run? I could believe with all my existence that the sky was purple and the grass was bright orange, and it still probably wouldn't shake your belief that they're blue and green. Truth is subjective. Truth is always changing. Truth isn't truth anymore, because honestly, truth is supposed to be that one thing that is unshakeable. That one thing that exists no matter what, no matter how you possibly look at it--2+2=4. You know. Gravity is what keeps us down on the surface of the earth. We go to school from eight in the morning till almost three in the afternoon. We know these things. They're the truth.

Postmodernism doesn't necessarily skewer faith, but it sort of discounts it. Take the grand narrative, for example, the metanarrative--maybe one of the biggest ones, so big you don't even think of it this way, is Christianity. You ask a Christian what he or she thinks, and he/she'll tell you, "God exists. I believe in him." And to them, that's true, that exists, it's the truth. It works for those people. But it doesn't always work for everyone else. So theoretically, there's no real center holding us all together, nothing around which every human being can revolve, sharing some similarity with every other human being.

...But what about humanity itself? Can't we all agree that we're human? That's kind of how I'm feeling, the more I think about it. And then there's always the argument that the entire lack of a center, the complete absense of a metanarrative, is a metanarrative in itself. It's all contradictions!! In my eyes, postmodernism is just a bunch of contradictions, and one big giant excuse to disagree with people about things that there should be no disagreement. (...Is disagreement a word? If it's not... I just made it one.)

Personally, I believe that faith is what moves us forward through a lot of our lives--not necessarily religious faith, since I'm not an overly religious person. But there are some things that I think we just need to take as "truth," and not question so much. Like science. Biology class. My textbook can tell me it exists as much as it wants, but I personally have little evidence of the existence of DNA polymerase III, I've never seen it. I just choose to believe it. We believe what we want, and in the end, we don't believe what we don't want to believe. Sometimes that gets us into trouble. But at the same time, that's a little bit of what makes us human.

All I really know is that I don't get postmodernism all that much, and I'm not a particularly huge fan, but I've been using it all semester: "In my reality," I may tell Deanna, "you don't actually have red hair. Maybe it's purple... with polka-dots." I could really believe that. And to me, it would be true. What an excuse to get away with ridiculous things.

I'm not saying that it all can't be used for other things--just stating, in that weird and tired way that I tend to state things in, that it's not really my cup of tea. Postmodernism. Because it can be a cup of tea, if it wants to be. It could also be a giraffe, I bet. Maybe I really do believe it's a giraffe. ...Only I don't believe it's a giraffe.

catnip?

Lately I have been finding myself fascinated by this brief touching on the subject of "pseudo-modernism," which can be classified as one step beyond postmodernism. What intrigues me the most is how much it simply makes sense to me--this "pseudo-modernism" is, I think I could argue, present everywhere in today's society, so much so that we don't really notice it anymore, if we ever did. More than that, we're okay with it. I think I touched on this a little in my last blog on here, and this isn't really the focus of my writing this week, but I just wanted to bring that up a little bit.

It is very noticeable, the fact that we rely so much on the internet nowadays. Honestly, where would we be without Google? How convenient it can prove to be. Whenever we have the simplest question, we can just type a few key words into that nifty little search bar, and the world wide web will provide us with fifty billion different ways to explain an answer.

In some ways, I really do see this as a good thing. Information is more accessible now than it has ever been before, just waiting out there, waiting for someone to reach out to it and grasp with all their might.

However, the problem that I'm seeing is that we too often are lacking in this might. We can't always reach out, with purpose, and grab exactly what we need--or if we can, we can't use it for much anyways. Sure, we've got all this useless knowledge now, floating around in our brains, bouncing off walls, getting lodged in the folds of our cerebral cortex... But do we use it?

I don't know about these claims that humans only use 10% of their brains, but I do know for positive there is a lot of what we would call "knowledge" that sits in there, molding away, stored away one day never to be used again. Why is this? As I said, knowledge is plentiful, just asking us to snap it up. So we do. And we'll hold onto it for awhile, and never look at it again. Mostly because we just don't care.

All this random information just encourages us to skim about, shuffle through the piles and piles of things, read a few words here and there, perform a surface-level analysis or sorts and take a surface-level meaning out of it all. With so much around us, our eyes roll around in their sockets, our brains are overwhelmed, our synapses try to fire too quickly. We don't retain any of it, if we even pay attention that long: it's like going to an art museum, to use a crude sort of analogy. You stare at one painting for a few seconds--take a brief moment to wonder what it means--decide it's not worth your time--move on to the next one, only to repeat the process over and over again.

Short attention spans!!! It all comes down to short attention spans. Short attention spans bred from the quick-paced nature of today's culture--all of that "pseudo-modernism," as I already hinted. I'm not sure if anyone else will remember this--but two years ago, in Honors English 10, Ms. Bennett told us that the average teenager's attention span was 12 minutes long. About how long is this, in perhaps more relateable terms? Approximately the amount of time we watch a television show until the first commercial break.

We don't really notice this kind of thing, do we? But once we do, it starts to become a little disturbing. We start to wonder, what will happen to humanity if consciousness, as we know it, as our ancestors have known it for centuries and centuries, is ultimately shrinking?

I'd like to take a moment to add to this discussion a pondering of the structure of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle; I just finished the novel this morning and found it... intriguing, to say the least.

One of the first things I noticed when I first started reading was the unusual structure. When we read a novel in an English class, the first thing we expect tends to be archaic language, extended syntax--long, long, interminable chapters (these criteria call to mind works like The Scarlet Letter and Sense and Sensibility, and any of my fellow classmates over the past few years will admit that these bring back scary, scary memories...). This book is just about the opposite of all that.

So I'm beginning to wonder, did Vonnegut foresee the shrinking of human consciousness, as I put it? Did he expect an audience with an incredibly short attention span, who couldn't focus on a single scene for more than three to four pages? I think this might be one of the main themes of the novel as a whole. It moves at a fast pace--similar to today's society, the way we know it--quick, jagged in some places. It flits from scene to scene, time frame to time frame. It can be confusing.

But we can keep up. Maybe that's the point that I am trying to make. He wrote it for us, he expected us.

And if this is the kind of book that attracts us, with its short chapters and quick-pace--completely favorable to our facilitated ADD. We don't have to think so hard. It moves quickly. Chapters don't go on for an eternity. It's "just catnip to the kids" (Vonnegut 95).

on cookies, music, and...

This week's prompt is quite wide, so I've decided to narrow it down and focus my pondering on one aspect of it. Whether this shall be detrimental or not to the flow or depth of my pondering... we shall see. Because it doesn't exist yet. ...But it's in the process!

I was fascinated by the little bit of Alan Kirby's article that we read aloud in class the other day, because, though my brain wasn't completely wrapping around it at first, one little tidbit really sharpened my focus: "Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism."

This shocked me. All at once it made perfect sense, though I'd never thought of it that way before--today is all about complete and total immersion. Maybe it was something in the back of my mind, somewhere, but I'd never thought of it as a bad thing. In fact, even now I'm not totally sure it is all bad.

I think my best way to present this is with a few real-world examples. Not just real, but... well, real, as in, right off of me. Example one: anyone who knows me [semi-well] knows of my recent obsession (is obsession the right word? I haven't figured that out yet...) with baking. Things lately are stressful. The process of baking cookies makes the world disappear for about half an hour, and all I can think about is cookies, cookies, love, cookie dough, and more cookies. As Kirby states, it "takes the world away."

Example two, and I think this is one we can all identify with (since I'm such a weirdo with the cookies): sometimes I flick on my iPod, shuffle to the perfect song, and imagine that nothing exists but the music. It's not difficult, if you don't have too much on your mind--all original thought sort of melts away, replaced by lyrics, melody, harmony, bass lines, the sound of the singer's voice. For approximately three minutes and thirty seconds, that's all that exists.

There are a billion other things we do, every day, in an attempt to exclude ourselves from the world--we don't always know it, but we do. I feel like this should be a scary thing.... But maybe it's not... Maybe it is....

So let me have a minute to try to reason it out a little bit... Maybe the bad part of it is that we feel like there's stuff out there we want to hide away from--we want the world to go away for awhile. So what's out there? Hatred, ignorance, death, despair, misunderstanding... And that's nothing we can fix, easily, quickly--that's stuff that's going to be there for the rest of our lives, somewhere, in some form, always audible, always painful.

Plus, we're really relying on that, aren't we? All the painful stuff--we can just ignore it, if we can fully immerse ourselves in something else, forget that the world around us exists. It's more than a defense mechanism, it's just what we do. What we've come to live. Just like I said--I didn't see anything wrong with it, at first. I'm still thinking it's kind of okay. It's just the way we've moved as a society. Then, of course, that brings up all the questions about how we are moving as a society: Are we progressing? Is this progress a good thing? What do we get once we've reached the tippy-top of that progress? Where will we be then? Can you progress past the tippy-top of progress??

Ahhh, good old postmodernism. Ask a simple question, and all you get for an answer are more questions.

Cat's Cradle So Far...

I'd like to open up by declaring that I really am enjoying this novel so far. I haven't gotten that far in yet... And I know there are some people who have some serious objections to whatever happens later in the book... So I'm looking forward to getting to that. Vonnegut's style is different than anything I've ever read before.

I like it.

So one thing that really jumped out at me as I was reading was Newt Hoenikker's off-hand comment at the beginning fo chapter six: "Aren't the gorges beautiful? This year, two girls jumped into one holding hands. They didn't get into the sorority they wanted. They wanted Tri-Delt" (pg 13). Then he goes on to continue his story--reminiscent of his father, I think, saying whatever may come to mind and then moving onto the next interesting thing...

I find this novel, so far, to be very postmodern in its outright discussion of lies. To me, a lot of postmodernism is sort of delving into the depths of subjects people don't really like thinking about--stuff they're uncomfortable with. And Vonnegut pointing out that religion is founded on lies definately falls into that category of discomfort. Take the first sentence in The Books of Bokonon: "All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies" (pg 5).

Even the format of the novel itself adds a little to the reader's discomfort--we open a book, and more often than not expect to see tradition, as it has been laid down for centuries by all the great authors--lengthy chapters, mostly. Something about these ultra-short chapters worries us somehow. Maybe we can't quite put our finger on it... I know I certainly can't... And, like I said, to me... that's a little bit of postmodernism.

I'm definately looking forward to reading more. Onward we plunge!!!