Class Notes 4/7 - Test Time

Test Questions......(some)....for the Quiz on Friday!
1. Name the Four Quartets....don't have ot be in order
2. When I wake, I cry to dream again. - Who said it? Calaban
3. Memorize, verbatim from Little Gidding -
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
4. "I only want to please you." - Prospero, also connected to Dr. Sexson's personal story about the woman on the plane.
5. Last words of The Following Story: the following story.
6. What river do they end up on in The Following Story? Amazon
7. What is the name of the hollow book where Neo hides money in the movie The Matrix? Simulacra and Simulation
8. Symbols of life and death in Four Quartets? Rose and the Yew tree
9. Arabic word in The Alchemist "it is written" - maktub
10. River related symbol that represents Anna Livia in Finnegans Wake, the delta (looks like a traingle...)
11. Little Gidding, what is the cost of simplicity? not less than everything.
12. Where does boy in The Alchemist find his treasure? ruined/abandoned church, under the tree.
13. gnosis = knowledge
14. What does Prospero say, what is his line to Miranda?
"What else see'st thou in the dark backward and abysm of time?"
15. Essence of alchemy according to Christina? process of purification
16. What little animal is in the garden in Burnt Norton? A bird
17. What is Herman Mussert's nickname? Socrates
18. Santiago de Compstela: pilgramage route in Spain
19. What is the glitch in The Matrix? deja vu
20. mysterious mental maneuver
21. Shakespeare is to Prospero as Beckett is to Molloy......according to Maggie
23. What is the Emerald tablet, Elixir of Life, Philosopher's Stone? aims/ends of Alchemy written on Emerald tablet.
24. Who else is on the boat with Mussert? 6 people, pilot, priest, child, teacher, journalist, acedemic (sounds like the beginning of an interesting joke)
25. What language was The Alchemist originally written in? Portugese.
26. Anima Mundi - soul of spirit of the world
27. 2 colors symbolize alchemy (of the rose) red and white (Jennie Lynn and I nearly freaked out with a link to Ulysses!!!)
28. reapeated word in The Tempest - 3 letter word - Now
29. Game Ferdinand and Miranda are playing in The Tempest? chess
30. Mussert's profession - teacher
31. Miranda's nine attendents according to Dr. Sexson = 9 muses
32. Latin word -- time dies
33. Exception to our class, Bible and Shakespeare, enormously popular and enormously unread.
34. How long is The Following Story? 2 seconds
35. Four Quartets, children, leaves full of children, apple tree, child as archetypal figure.....represent world of innocence.
36. The world is a meverending cross reference - Mussert (no story is ever static, another turning of the page)
37. release me from these bands with the help of your good hands.............asking for an applause to end the play
38. Hot babe in desert that Santiago falls for? Fatima

There are the questions that I wrote down from class. There will probably be an essay question on the test, but that was not revealed.

Sorry Lisa Little Legs

I think Lisa's blog fell through the cracks somewhere, because she alerted me to the fact that she was not on the class blog list on my blog. So I have added her blog to the blog list and she has been up on her blogging all year, so here is a new blogger to check out.

Lisa Little Legs Blog

Memorized Finnegans Wake

Today April 6!! Tuesday.
Recitation/Filming of our memorized Finnegans Wake lines at The Baxter (on Main St. above Ted's Grill and The Bacchus). 6pm-9pm. Wear black if possible, socks, and creative/tasteful mask or make-up is optional.

Class Notes 3/31

-What I know now, what I didn't know before.....and what difference does it make?
- Dr. Sexson would like to see lots of people writing about The Following Story...
- Blog about other blogs
- homestretch in regards to group presentations and paper.....
these presentations should knock our socks off. we will end the class with a pile of socks.
for the paper, resources, books, and our blogs....

QUIZ!! April 9th, Friday
April 12th, conclusion of the class

accentuate the positive: Bing Crosby (Rio played this song in class)


but if you do accentuate the positive you miss out in kenosis, Beckett.....

cheesy...but not at all
for everything to end happily, is not cheesy, but a happy ending is transcendence of the universes...
must go through a process of purification, darkness... alchemical imagery is key...

The Alchemist, page 136-7....also The Tempest, Act V Scn. 1 Line 202
Ferdinand and Miranda...gold on lasting pillars
alchemical wedding, purification of the soul
man and woman union, unification...cheesy, but on the highest possible level...


We talked about
Simone CAROTI
"Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare's The Tempest"
"In Shakespeare's play, and in a relevant cross-section of scifitexts as well, the contemplation of the wonderful and the miraculous seems to possess a special quality of kindness, of mercifulness towards our human failings. As with Prospero when Ariel convinces him to be lenient towards Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio, it has the ability to bend our thoughts toward forgiveness rather than vengeance, and to make us willing to reexamine our personal convictions in the light of something greater than us." (page 6 of 12)

The Forbidden Planet, talk about cheesy, sci-fi version of The Tempest....hot babe....robot = Caliban
Just for fun: Forbidden Planet 1956 Part 4 of 10



Four Quartets: a new way of looking at eternity...
page 49, Zero summer

then towards the end of class people gave a passage from The Four Quartets and their discovery

Class Notes 3/29

Homework: be generating paper topics....

Christina's blog......anyone who has blogged has contributed to the uniqueness of the class....

More Homework, same homework: blog about the blogs of others, and although Christina's blog was superb, Dr. Sexson asked the rest of us to be more specific.

Wizard of Oz clip - audience, largely children, needs to have lessons and messages...

The Alchemist, young adult level

Erin has loves The Alchemist, see her blog.

The Following Story, which should all be reading, quotes mysterious mental maneuver from Transparent Things by Nabokov.

We need to give up intellectual pretentiousness, anger, superiority, etc. in order to read The Alchemist. It is all part of the great ocean of the sea of stories!

We heard Joan's thesis idea.....Joan I have some books for you and some sources if you need any! See her blog.

simple definition of Alchemy: purification of the soul

to purify, to simplify, burn out impurities
we start with "yuck" or base matter, get rid of all the yuck, Purify to get pure essence.

Finnegans Wake alchemist.....Shem see pages 183-5

Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding
"Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe"

Heraclitus.....quotes at the beginning and throughout.....Eliot stealing from him

Job in life, to purify ourselves, but there are so many distractions ...... David Bowie gets distracted from saving his home planet....in the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth



where the rose and fire become one, the rose is a central symbol in the Four Quartets,

http://www.wisdomportal.com/Poems2008/RoseInAlchemy.html

also see page 80 in The Alchemist

Carl Jung, archetypal patterns in literature

pg 183 in Finnegans Wake, Joyce working with the notion of muck not alien because when we read Dante's The Divine Comedy we see people swimming in excrement......

wikipedia -The Shirt of Nessus, Tunic of Nessus, Nessus-robe, or Nessus' shirt in Greek mythology was the poisoned shirt that killed Heracles. It was once a popular reference in literature. In folkloristics, it is considered an instance of the "poison dress" motif

page. 83 in The Alchemist, "Did you learn anything?"
reminds us of The Wizard of Oz
surface of the emerald, last lines of the Four Quartets....

"Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."

condition of complete simplicity, kenosis is missing in The Alchemist....it is missing Samuel Beckett

At the FW meeting, Queen of Underworld, gives up everything...

page 185, the question and answer section, Laurence Fishburne, who played Morpheus in The Matrix, is going to play the alchemist in The Alchemist.

Class Notes 3/26

Quiz: April 9th, monday
blog your working thesis: April 12th, friday

Rachel has been working on her thesis....time deja vu, memory

We watched the youtube.com clip from The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy realizes....or is told....she had the power all along...."had to leard it for herself"....not enough to want it, go look fo heart's desire.....find the Oz clip here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11BQQvVy8LI

Read:
Lissa's blog, hate & love, Shakespeare, Jon Orsi's blog....existential crisis.......

have you been following your dream? I hope not, because my dream last night a giant tarantula was chasing me........

The Alchemist - Personal Legend, see wikipedia...

Kyle's blog, sleep paralysis....BLOG: room where you sleep

portal in Alchemist, into other works that are in the book. Rumi had already written this story....and Rabbi, Treasure Under the Bridge....
treasure alwas in my possesion

So what? you can change lead into gold. gold would be worth nothing.

East Coker:
"You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not. "

no ecstasy, go by way of ignorance...
need to go through portal...

ecstasy - ekstasis - standing outside ourself....
enthusiasm - posessed by god

go through the dark night of the soul...

Kenosis, emptying out...

Vishnu dream: lotos rose from the navel
Four Quartets: "And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,"

HOMEWORK: blog about the blogger/blog who has taught you the most, or has been the most important to you.....

Class Notes 3/24

April 12....blog your thesis statment for your paper ...

Dr. Sexson wanted to reinforce some things...

Maggie saw the class as becoming cultish...reminding us not to blindly follow the leader figure....could turn into a Jim Jones figure.

(As a side comment of my own: I understand if anyone might be feeling a bit overwhelmed in Dr. Sexson's class. Dr. Sexson's classes are usually full of repeat customers. To someone new to the "Sexson" experience, it might be cultish, but really, it is just people who enjoy what and how they learn in class. And this is something I enjoy being a part of. Learning with people who have an interest and passion in class. The mutual enjoyment of learning and comradeship in class is brought out by Dr. Sexson, and I have yet to find anything like it in any other class, and I've been at MSU for 5 years. And if it looks like we've all drank the Kool Aid.....it's because we have.)


The magician or leader exposes self to be not so smart... hmmmm..(but that is what smart people do.)
-Oracle in The Matrix
-Ovid's witch
-Prospero, gives everything up in the end..."drown my books"

where will you be without that feather, Dumbo

We watched a clip of a movie version of The Tempest.....a clip of Prospero drowing his books....

when we call something wierd, we are applying it to something we don't understand.

Vishnu Dreaming the World, Joseph Campbell

"Hence, we are all one in Vishnu: manifestations, inflections, of this dreaming power of Vishnu; broken images of himself rippling on the spontaneously active surface of his subtle mind stuff. Moreover, this sleeping god's divine dream of the universe is pictured in Indian art as a great lotus plant growing from his navel. The idea is that the dream unfolds like a glorious flower, and that this flower is the energy-or, as the Indians say. the shakti or goddess-of the god. I hope that some of you are recalling the counterparts of some of these images in the Biblical tradition. The waters that are stirred into action when creation takes place are comparable to those of the first verse of the Bible, where it is said that the wind or breath of god blew, or brooded, over the waters. "

we are all the dreams of Vishnu - what happens when he wakes up?
something dreams through you, you are not your dream....part of the Self (catpital ess).

Midsummers Night Dream, dreamer, sacred marriage
bottoms dream because it had a bottom

The Alchemist

Doug reminded of Siddhartha
paradox

should not cease from exploration and return to where you started and know the place for the first time.

transmutation of the soul.....metaphor lead into gold

define: McGuffin
Google: elixir of life

Santiago's treasure a metaphor, like the battlefield in the Bhagavad-Gita

Harry Potter........got people reading again.....also a lot of Alchemy in the books.

*we have to evolve our sense of imagination
young: read the Alchemist
older: read Joyce's The Al-Shem-ist in Finnegans Wake.

Michael, Dr. Sexson...a person worth saving from Hawaii, ocean of stories we need to appreciate.
The Following Story, recapitulates & deals with every theme of the class. We should be re-reading that and blogging on it.....