I really enjoyed all the individual presentations and I looking forward to all the group projects. Ours is coming together really well and it should be really funny. Our interpretations of the past possessing the future is very....creative. Regarding the individual presentations I really liked the theme that someone brought up about how magic is lost with age. It is the sad truth and something that we should try to work on, and it is probably a big reason as to why we find these metamorphoses poems and the golden ass works so interesting because in brings to light magic in a way that we can relate to, and make it seem almost real. When we are young magic is everywhere because we are able to create it more freely and with a more open imagination. I think that in growing up we loose some of the possibilities we once found in everything because we learn that that is not the way to perceive something or other, and in that sense our imaginations are thwarted and magic becomes less real and that is sad because I like magic, I like the idea of the unreal, the idea that there is some cool powers that we can see if we look hard enough. Anyway I thought that was a really good idea for a paper, props to whoever did that, sorry I'm not very good with names.

Final Paper

The First Love Song

Plato’s Eryximachus once theorized that we were once twice the people we are now, and because we were double in strength and intelligence we were a threat to the gods. Zeus had a plan however, to put us in our place and make us humble. Instead of destroying us all together, he cut us in half, which diminished our strength and multiplied us into greater numbers serving to be more profitable to the gods, anyway. But the splitting of our bodies had a more powerful effect on our souls than was probably intended. The consequence being that we are forever in search of our other half and only when we find the other half to our body will our soul be complete again, and that is love. This story comes from Plato’s Symposium and there are a number of other theories of what love is and how we should regard it, but there was one story that Plato forgot to include. There was another attendant at this particular symposium that had her own theory of what love is and where it came from, her name was Aglaia, and she was nothing more than a servant girl who tented to the tedious demand of a room full of drunken, half naked, preaching men. But Aglaia knew something about love that these old men did not. For, when she was a little girl and there were no toys to play with or time to waste she would help her mother dig and bury seeds in the rich soil of the garden. There was very rarely any dialogue between Aglaia and her mother, but her mother had the most beautiful voice in their village and she always sang as they worked side by side. Those songs that her mother sang used to fill her with such an immense joy that sometimes a tear would escape from her olive eye and roll gently down her cheek, not from any sense of distress, but from a kind of pure happiness . It was a combination of the beauty of the song and who it was coming from that created the love that Aglaia had for her mother.
One day when Aglaia and her mother were confined indoors because the rain was hounding down like small spears from the sky, Aglaia’s mother noticed one tear fall from her daughter’s eye. She cut short her song and asked Aglaia what was the matter. When Aglaia answered that her mother’s song had filled her with an overwhelming sense of joy, her mother smiled and asked her if she wanted to know why that happened. Aglaia nodded and the two went to sit on a folded blanket near the window. Aglaia’s mother began by telling her that the goddess Aphrodite once had a daughter whom she called Musea. But this daughter was never very well known among the gods or the people because Aphrodite had been expecting a son and was so disappointed with a daughter that she threw Musea from the clouds and proceeded to forget all about her. But Hephaestus had watched what Aphrodite had done and being that he was the father of Musea, he planted a volcano where Musea was falling, and because she was the offspring of the god of fire she did not burn or even feel pain when she fell into the burning lava. Instead she floated to the top and gradually slid down to the base of the volcano where she was found and raised by mortals. The older Musea grew, the more beautiful she became and like any youthful girl she found herself very interested in one particular young man. As they grew to be closer and the best of friends they fell madly in love with each other and never left the other’s side. One day, a very dreadful day, a neighboring village invaded their village burned down their houses and stole away the strongest men for their own armies. In the depths of that disaster, Musea’s love was torn from her arms and carried away to be enslaved in a land she could not find. Musea’s heart was broken, and she vowed to spend the rest of her life searching until she found her true love or until she died. Musea had been taught from the people who had adopted her that sometime if you prayed and worshiped to the gods and goddesses hard enough that sometimes they would help you. Knowing that this was a matter of love she fled to the nearest and the highest temple of Aphrodite to sacrifice a stag and beg on her knees for help. But little did Musea know, Aphrodite was her mother and little did Aphrodite know that Musea was still alive.
As Aphrodite sat in her throne in the heavens watching all the people in her temples praise her, she was particularly drawn to one girl’s face, it was familiar, like she had seen those eyes before. Though, that must be impossible she thought to herself, but I have nothing better to do so I shall see what this mortal wants of me, and she floated down to stand before Musea in all her glory. Once Aphrodite was in her daughters presence she knew immediately who this woman was, and watching her daughter cry before her asking her to help her find her true love, Aphrodite felt guilt and she pitied Musea who did not even know that she was a goddess. However, instead of telling Musea that she was her daughter; Aphrodite decided to help her daughter find this true love, though she doubted that it was anything more than young lust. She called up to the gods in heaven to look down on the earth and find her daughter’s lover. When he had been sighted Aphrodite took her to just outside where her lover was. Musea thanked Aphrodite with a tear in her eye and Aphrodite left thinking she had set things right.
Musea’s heart pounded harder than usual, sweat beaded up on her forehead and her hands shook a little, but she walked on anyway. Their eyes met in a courtyard, locked and without blinking they ran to each other, embraced and kissed. This was their first real kiss and it filled Musea with such a joy that her vocal cords began to ring, and she burst out in the very first love song. Musea sang and sang until you would think there was no more air in her lungs, but she kept singing and it was a beautiful song. Gradually, her body had begun to tingle like when you first step out from your warm house into the winter air and she felt light like she wasn’t touching the ground, and she wasn’t. As the song came to an end her body burst into a thousand beads of colored light and for the first and only time in the history of the world people saw what music looked like and it was more beautiful than any art the human hand could ever produce. When the beads of light had flickered out, there was nothing left but the resonance of the very first love song in everybody’s heart and it filled them with joy. That feeling of joy is aroused now by two things and two things alone, a beautiful song and love and you know you love someone when you get the same feeling that you get from a beautiful song.
Music is the one force that is present in everyone’s life, just like love, and they both invoke the same feeling all because the daughter of love exploded into song. Since then, Aglaia had heard many beautiful songs and each one that reminded her of her mother left her with that clenched heart, that skip in her step and that smile on her face. She leaned against the door to the kitchen in Agathon’s house and thought back to that rainy day when she found out how to recognize love and how true it was. She had had a few romances but no one had made her heart fill with the same joy as her mother’s songs, until she met the man she was now married to. Aglaia may not have told those men of great importance and stature how to truly recognize real love, but she smiled to herself anyway and went to get Aristophanes a feather to tickle his nose.

Final Paper

Cupid and Psyche

After reading Cupid and Psyche, it seems that it proves one of my points that I made in a previous blog about how the gods and goddesses are as human as humans are but have more power. They are struck with the same emotions as people are, like jealousy and fear. Aphrodite for instance is portraying all the symptoms of a normal worried, over protective mother. She is afraid that because Cupid has found another woman that is as beautiful as she is, she might lose the affection of her son. The other goddesses that Psyche goes to for help are fearful to help her because they know the damage that Aphrodite can put on them, but in the same way they are careful to defend Cupid because of the love spells he could potentially put on them, causing even more god drama.
One thing that I might have just missed or wasn't explained was why doesn't Cupid want Psyche to see him in the first place? If he had just let her see him she wouldn't have been capable of being tempted by her sisters into sneaking around in the dark trying to see him and potentially trying to kill him. The only way that I can make it make sense in my head is to make it a trust issue, by saying if you trust me you won't need to see me. Even then, I don't know why she would trust him.
The human characters and the roles they play remind me in a way of Cinderella. The jealous evil sisters plotting to destroy the life of their beautiful younger sister, only to get spited in the end. At first Psyche didn't seem like the brightest crayon in the box, but by the end and how she got her revenge was rather masterful and clever. I think that Psyche's character has lived long past this story of her, and one of the messages she gives is one that is still thought of today. She says that being beautiful does not necessarily make life easier but on the contrary, draws more attention to her and thus making it easier to point out her flaws. It's seems that she almost wishes her beauty to be not so great even though that's what has made her so famous, both amongst humans and gods.

I got my hands on my mom's photos from Italy, and when we were in Venice we saw this guy walking around handing out posters that I am assuming were posters promoting a Lysistrata play. Naturally making everyone in the plaza very uncomfortable, he was walking around rubbing his ... on girls, getting down on his knees and pleeding for sex (I'm assuming, I don't really know Italian). Just another example of how the past possesses the present (all over the world).

Stuck in An Imaginary Life

Realizing that this is a little past its time, here is my An Imaginary Life Essay...

As I read through An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, one recurrent theme that I noticed was this idea that there are levels to life and in particular the level of dreaming seems very relevant to our interpretations of life. However, it was not just in his dreams that he felt there were levels to life. In the fifth chapter as Ovid lied down to rest in the forest he expressed the observation that there were smaller levels to life as well, like the bugs and the earth. The more he started observing these levels the more I started making connections between them. In a way all of life, all of the earth, all of our relationships are connected in a set of stages and are tied together with our dreams.
The most basic stage is the stage at ground level, most literally. It is something that as people we don’t tend to think about very often but the earth and the ground level is why we are here, and how we are able to remain here. Without it we would not exist and in that sense we are apart of it. “The earth’s warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out its store of heat… and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors I know suddenly what it is I am composed of” (Malouf 146).
The second stage is the stage of the feral Child, who is connected to the natural world in a way that most of us cannot understand. Able to survive the winters and flourish happily and communicate with the beast that roam the earth in complete harmony, he has a deeper connection with everything that is in and around his world, except humans. It is through the character of Ovid, however, that he begins to get a glimpse of both the beauties of our language, “Gradually, one sound at a time, we are finding human speech in him. It is a game he delights in” (Malouf 92) and the faults of civilization, “Out there he would freeze. Whatever his secret was, I have taken it away from him” (Malouf 114).
The third stage is the stage that our narrator, Ovid is in the majority of the novel; the level of human perception in culture and poetry. He is able to take a seemingly stressful situation (that of banishment) and transgress it into that of experience and change. His expression that life is how we change and the never ending process of change, is one that is both real and rarely observed. “Strange to look back on the enormous landscape we have struggled across all these weeks, across the sea, across my life in Rome, across my childhood, to observe how clearly the footprints lead to this place and no other” (Malouf 151).
The last, but seemingly important, stage is the stage of dreams that is expressed throughout the novel, by Ovid. He is very aware of the dream world and it ties together with the other stages that I have described. One of the more powerful analogies that he makes is with the natural world and how it is tied to the dream world. His idea that all things have been dreaming themselves into a new existence in a stadial progression, “Having conceived in our sleep the idea of a further being, our bodies find, slowly, painfully, the physical process that will allow them to break their own bonds and leap up to it” (Malouf 29). It is a very powerful way to interpret both how we dream and why we do it. From the natural world to the intelligence we find in humans, it is the subconscious expressed through our dreams that we are able to find novelty and originality.

I've been going over the stories in Tales from Ovid a lot in my head lately, and often I find myself laughing at how silly some of the stories seem. Like Actaeon made me laugh because from the way the Roman art depicts all these gods and demigods, they were pretty much naked all the time anyway, and this poor guy comes along and just happens to stumble upon a really gorgeous naked god, totally not his fault, but he got turned into a stag anyway. Seems a little rash of Diana in my opinion. Then again, I don't know how much rationality goes into what these gods are doing.

They are all pretty funny in their own regard but another one that was particularly funny was Arethusa, who turned into a fountain on the island of Sicily. Once again, just minding her own business she decided to take a bath in the wrong river and who would have thunk it, but the river was Alpheus who by this time was madly in love. I mean talk about an analogy she was bathing in someone, Alpheus was probably in heaven. It's no wonder he fell in love with her. But now this poor little nymph scared shitless starts sweating, and just can't stop till she is nothing but water. Now, every time I go to the gym I'm going to think of Arethusa turning into water because she starting sweating too much. I can just imagine myself just busting into water all over the floor and splashing all the people around me, hahaha. Now that would make a scene.

Oh, and I wanted to make a side comment about my An Imaginary Life essay. Ya...I haven't gotten the book in the mail yet. I ordered it two weeks ago and it still hasn't come. I have to say I'm a little disappointed in Amazon right now. But Dr. Sexton, I have not forgotten and will post it as soooooon as I get the book. My apologies.