And Plato!

We talked last time about lies in the poets, the premise of the city-state, and the education of the guardians by music and gymnastic--all your basic book 3 topics--and also made this noble playdough unicorn ox with the ring of Gyges on its shoulders.

For book 4, we had our stalwarts Paul and Rex back again to tackle the definitions of the four virtues and the three parts of the soul that emerge from the search of the city.

pass it on to someone who would like it

Fancy fliers courtesy of Steph and Erika

More open letters: Rev Todd and the Tolkien Professor

Sent versions of the other May posts to their respective authors, but to these teachers I had to address myself as well:

Questions for Narnion (the professor's loremaster avatar)

Eagle sounds?

I think I am mostly just happy to be here--excited about catching up (finally!) on all the podcasts so far, and appreciating the audacity and fun of this project--and so I wanted to throw a question out there. Since I just listen to these sessions instead of watching live, I have been wondering: What's going on with the bird-of-prey sound effects? Do they come about at specific times, when you say some magic words, or are they generated totally randomly, or something in between? I'll try to come up with a better question next time, but this has just been niggling at me...

--

'Not your Shire'

Seems like an important phrase we keep coming back to. Here are some of the ways I have been turning it over, possible perspectives on it. See if you think they are interesting/valid at all:

- Something in the world has changed, objectively; this Shire infiltrated by rings and -wraiths is not the Shire which was yours. That Shire existed, but is now gone.

- That Shire you conceived of was never a thing. Your Shire only seemed safe and comfortable to you in your own ignorance of the truth. Thank goodness for an outbreak of obvious strangeness to set you straight.

- You have a misunderstanding of ownership which leads you to apply a possessive where it doesn't belong. This Shire is not your Shire, for all your maps and walking songs, sort of like the light of the Silmarils was not Feanor's, for all his craft and lore; or again like those mushrooms were not your mushrooms, just like those pears weren't Augustine's pears.

- Not only does the Shire not belong to you, but you don't even belong to the Shire; your home is elsewhere, and you must give up the Shire you love not once but repeatedly, now and after the scouring, and leave Middle-Earth entirely. We Elves can feel you on that.

--

And for the atheist preacher

Like I said, I just wanted to send you a note appreciating and responding to your sermons. These past few weeks seem to make up a kind of series on Christian roots and UU flowerings, or in the language of the dialectic, on the movement of the idea through its successive encapsulations in faith and reason, both in your personal history and the bigger picture. Fascinating stuff!

I always try to take notes on the points you make, but the talk on the Centurion in particular got me thinking: it seems to me that what you say about the Roman Centurion representing authority and Jesus crucified representing the oppressed is true, but that in practice no one is fully in the position of either the one or the other. We each have something in us of the authoritarian, so that given certain kinds of power, we are bound to make mistakes and even commit frauds and do violence; we each have something in us of the oppressed, too, and suffer from the control and cruelty of others or of circumstances. Looking at it like this, the remarkable thing about that moment is that the Centurion recognizes that surely this man was the son of God, but that identification with the sufferer has to cut the other way, too: the suffering Christ is at the same time Christ Pantocrator....I don't know if that seems all that profound, but your way of talking about it made me realize that for me the challenge of faith is not just the paradox of God becoming man, the Word made flesh, but of the completely innocent, completely sinless human being who is also perfect in power, with ultimate authority. Taken as literally or as metaphorically as you like, these are difficult and interesting topics to turn, turn, turn, seeing them now in light and now in a healthy shadow.

Thanks for your time, and I'm looking forward to the next in the series!

More May-mess

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
- Hopkins

And out of the llama notebook where I make my psychological observations, since Brian sent me off in the footsteps of the poet and of Piaget, here are some notes from the Taproot Talk:

5/20
Then again Sharma Shields the writer laying bare her imperfections in search of deeper understanding of who she is, and in the belief that this Spokane community’s mutual support for the arts will continue to grow and will benefit from the knowledge. She touched on the video game--King’s Quest--that inspired her to read Greek myths and start writing her own books, from reading them upside down in the crib, how her Grandma’s South Hill farm where she would play outside became the Target, how her parents’ cabin on Kilroy Bay became the turning point in her depression, the place where she kept her promise to herself to write. And she has seen counselors, beginning with a mostly deaf one who told her to enunciate very clearly her passionate emotions, group therapy, spoken in front of more groups than our little gathering at Spark about her work and her drunk driving that cost her the Lilac crown and didn’t stop there, these lies she told and now this truth, knowing it was wrong and trying to make it right, but which gave her the drama, the story, which surely every writer and everyone must sometimes wish to make real, and not only in telling the story--she touched on the ineffability topos the Dante lecturer mentions, praising her own imagination, whatever else she might be dissatisfied with about herself, she is proud of that, and even if it doesn’t always make it to the page, it’s great up here. She had her images of family pictures and favorite books, and wanted sch a collage from each of her friends present, but of course another side of the ineffability topos is the impossibility of doing everything we might want, even such a small project as that, much less reading everything there is to read once it were done, like plumbing the self to complete knowledge in stories; whereas though she did not speak about it, that very silence at the end of all efforts, the mystical mystery of religious prayer or meditation practice, might be able. I held my question about story-telling or only -inspiring in video games, since it seemed like it was time to close, but maybe I’ll send her an email as well; Steph wanted to ask her about working on her publications. She also reminded me about her answer to one good question about the possibility of prevention or mitigation of others making her mistakes--what could someone have said? Not to say, Don’t do this, because they’re going to want to experiment, but to tell true stories, a la Pullman, of what she has experienced.

May the Fourth Miscellany

The panelists ranged over the Hero’s Journey (see handout, doubling for fanning myself with) and archetypes, three act structure and ring structure, screenwriting tropes and characterization and rhetoric and deconstruction and design principles and historical context, and several times I got up to visit the snack board and gulp water, for it was the warmest day of the year, and I’d been out in the sun at the farm fair all afternoon besides, putting up a happy front for the kids though I felt like a bit of a hypocrite,--but where it all ended up, between fielding intricately thought-out questions and the nerdy tidbits de rigeur on lightsaber colors and whether Han shot first--this went completely over Steph’s and my head--and with deft facilitation moving through such a madcap congeries of topics while providing for the insecurities of the personalities, who had dedicated such care and thought to these problems and analyses, being laid bare and brushing up against one another now awkwardly, now meanly, so that I lost heart and never asked my own question about the Force and freedom, as the requisite points were made about good and evil portrayed as black and white at first in episodes 4-6, then in the prologues giving us an anti-hero balanced by despicable pandering slapstick, and now with the sequels gritty grayscale, which to me missed the whole point: that this is a mythic story, told in images as Tolkien’s is in words, and that the choices of the heroes do matter more than the banality of evil or innocence of the Empire’s citizens or the Rebels’ complex justifications--where we ended up was that aside from all this stuff, the movies are just so fun--awesome--playable and replayable, not as Catholic-serious as Tolkien’s myth but presumably laughing Buddhist--but so on a note of nostalgia for earliest distinct aesthetic experiences, loving reminiscences of watching at a theater or drive-through or in a basement on a VCR so many times the tape broke, that this is as important as and inseparable from the way the films resonate with myth and cultural desire and wish-fulfillment...So what kind of argument is that? Was the question, why is this good storytelling, or what does this teach us about storytelling, remotely addressed, much less answered, or did I just come away with a summary of some bibliographies for unwritten books? As if I of all people needed such a thing, what! The irony! It left me wishing there had been a true, open seminar or a frank lecture series rather than this mishmash panel discussion, with us little Leia- and Luke-slaves and the mighty totemic Jabbas raised on their stage dais, with that off-putting if interesting drama of their egos, angsts, and over-compensation, particularly that of the rhetorician-philosopher, being played out up before us. Still, edifying all around, to one permitted to listen feeling smug and superior in the front row, to glean psychological insights, unintentional-turned-intentional, over and above the billing, besides the intriguing nuggets that Thom Caraway teaches a Tolkien course at Whitworth; that the prologue and the whole saga might be narrated by R2; and that in the main divergence from formulae--that the ordinary world is the special world, that home is already or soon to be destroyed--however conscious or slavish his writing and work may be in other respects, Lucas has given us something wonderful, original, profoundly true--and so much damn fun.

Plato in the spring, second meeting

From the end of book 1, Socrates speaking to Thrasymachus blushing:

"I have not dined well, however— [354b] by my own fault, not yours. But just as gluttons snatch at every dish that is handed along and taste it before they have properly enjoyed the preceding, so I, methinks, before finding the first object of our inquiry—what justice is—let go of that and set out to consider something about it, namely whether it is vice and ignorance or wisdom and virtue; and again, when later the view was sprung upon us that injustice is more profitable than justice I could not refrain from turning to that from the other topic. So that for me [354c] the present outcome of the discussion is that I know nothing. For if I don't know what the just is, I shall hardly know whether it is a virtue or not, and whether its possessor is or is not happy.”

We snacked on summery picnic food and wondered what Socrates was doing: answering this new demand for praise of justice' inherent worth against the praises of injustice by considering a city as a way to see the individual better? We were joined by Paul and Nate this time, and also ranged over the Ring of Gyges' relationship to the One Ring and the parameters for music/poetry and the sorts of stories about gods to be told in this city.

Whereas the thing I did not do,

Continued not to do, was to write or make things, aside from these connections, which are well and good, but hardly that one thing needful. For all these groups and consolations of company, events and the possibility of eventually writing about more and more ever accumulating and ever receding, it has not happened. Camp Nanowrimo seemed like a good idea back on the first of April, but all month I did nothing on the spring semester of the Book of Annotations but ponder and make plans. For the short story workshop I managed a paltry handwritten page, and for the memoir class likewise, only because there was a deadline there in each case, or perhaps out-thinking myself, supposing that if it was only for a deadline, there was hardly any point in more sustained effort over more time. So that if I had more time, all the time in the world, I actually might write every day as I ought to, rather than for imaginary deadlines and chance encouragement of groups. That seems like the way to find the balance, still, to write every day as I want to, and to share it with whomever is interested, by association or broadcast to the interwebs. To write it by hand, in a notebook of small pages Steph found, with a llama on the cover, or on the backs of pages for school as I like to do, only doing a better job of keeping them together, or on the various documents open on the computer, or here blogily, linking to them all, but writing somehow, and then making it freely available. (Donations accepted (preferably in kind (food, drink, or conversation:))).