FRONT MATTER:
- Assignment for next class: Hug a tree, and gather photographic proof to post on your blog.
- Watch your email: The assigned origin stories we will be retelling are on their way. These will be presented in three minutes, with ample eye-contact, without notes, in an outrageously entertaining manner, on September the 12th.
- Ensure that you have a link to everyone's blog on the homepage of your own blog. Check Scott Jeffrey's blog for the master list. If your blog isn't on there, send Michael Sexson an email with a link to it.
IMPORTANT TERMS/INTERESTING TIDBITS:
- "Myth is the precedent behind every action."
- 'The collective unconscious', as coined by Carl Jung. He states, “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic content."
- The word mythology is derived from two parts:
Mythos = story.
Logos = true.
- 'Axis mundi', or 'the navel of the world'. Also known as the world tree, the cosmic axis, world axis, pillar of the world, or the center of the world. Signifies a union or communication between the upper and lower, or heaven and earth.
- Etiology - The study of the cause or reason for a thing.
"Ratchet it up. Myth asks, 'How did things come to be?'"
- Exemplary: The primary or the most outstanding example of something.
- Consider checking out 'Ulysses' by James Joyce. (Ulysses, Roman for Odysseus, of the Odyssey. An extremely mythological story, but "...mythological on a different pitch, the pitch of reality. This is the pitch we live in, but Joyce shows us that all you have to do is scratch the surface, and all the myths come pouring out.")
ET CETERA:
"Men are ruined by two things: Women, and snakes."
"Without your books, your computers, your external prostheses, you are, as they say, 'up the creek'. In the old days, it was a part of you-- ten-thousand, twenty-thousand words of poetry, all in your head, inseparable from you."
"Perhaps 'original' isn't doing something unique. Perhaps original is going back to the origins."
"The footsteps are already there. You just need to put your feet in them."
"Historians would like to tell you that all past is historical. But I can tell you that all past is also psychological."
"All these memories are around three, four, five... Just before learning the thing that would ruin us forever. To speak. And when we learned to speak, we learned to...?
You learn to speak, you learn to build worlds, and my God! what a thing to be able to do!"
"(Adam & Eve) is a great story, and we got here because... Austin took a sucker? You see how this is? How it is the past that is the present. It is the past, not the dates, that are important."
“The worst place to be, is outside of a story.
"Myth is not an explanation of. In myth, what is above is reflected in what is below."
"Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
- from 'Four Quartets' by T.S. Eliot
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