What is love? Baby don't hurt me...no more.

What is love?

No really. What is love?

Is it the one power that rules us all like the one ring? (I need to get off this facetious kick).

Is it blind? Is it rational?

Do we choose it?

Like Kylie, I too believe that we choose to accept love rather than choose to be in love. I don't  think that we all have this switch inside of us that we turn off and on depending on if we want to love someone or not. It takes time to grow and takes more than just willpower to manifest. We choose to allow ourselves to love another just as we choose to accept love from another person. It is all about choice even though sometimes, one cannot help but have feelings for another person. I've been there. I liked the same guy for more than five years even though I didn't want to like him for I knew the relationship would never happen. However, deep down inside, I know I chose to continue to like him and go along with my friends' encouragements. Just as now, I am choosing to let go of the feelings I had for him; the why part of that is a long story.

I also believe that there are different kinds of love like romantic love, platonic love, familial love...destructive love, enriching love. I also believe that there is a huge difference between lust and love which is why I have such a hard time with Romeo and Juliette because I cannot for the life of me decide whether or not I think they are in love or in lust with each other. But that is beside the point. The point is that there are many different kinds of love which makes it a complicated thing indeed. When one adds soulmates into the mix, that just makes it even more complicated because that adds an entirely new set of beliefs and opinions. Alison believes that everyone has more than one soulmate and that there are different kinds such as intellectual soulmates v. romantic ones. I'm inclined to believe that as well. Though a part of me also believes in the soulmate mythology of the Japanese and Chinese. An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstances. The thread may stretch or tangle but will never break. The Chinese believe that around the ankles of men and women are tied red strings of fate that attach to their soulmates; the Japanese believe it attaches to the pinky. According to Laurie Sue Brockway in Your Interfaith Wedding, "The red string of fate celebrates the legend that soulmates are tied together at the ankle at birth to ensure they will find each other someday, " (75). Don't ask me why I am so fond of this concept, I think it's the romantic in me. However, like I said, I do also believe that there is more than one soulmate out there for us, just different kinds and in different forms.

This makes me wonder about both the relationships of the main couples in the books/stories we read in class this past week, Ligeia and The Shining, for they are truly puzzling ones.

In Ligeia, Poe's narrator practically festishizes Ligeia to the point where he can't escape either her eyes or her intelligence. “Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.” On page twenty-nine, all he does is describe her eyes; why is he so obsessed with them? By describing her eyes are the twin stars of Leda, he is also telling us that she and her eyes became his moon and his sun, his night and day. How and why? Because the twins Leda bore from Zeus are Artemis and Apollo: the moon goddess and the sun god. His whole being revolves around his obsession with her eyes to the point where he forgets her last name and how they met and all he remembers is her strange beauty. Who do her eyes really belong to in this case? Was he really in love with her? I am puzzled about the latter especially. Regardless of whether or not their love was real though, I believe that their relationship was highly unhealthy. It was parasitic. He kept feeding off of her identity, off her appearance, and off her soul until she slowly wasted away to nothing from her lack of selfhood and died.

Even when Ligeia is gone, she is still all he can see, all he can compare life to. Just as he took over her in life, she takes over him in death.

Another interesting relationship that we talked about this week was the relationship between Jack and Wendy Torrrance in The Shining. Unlike Poe’s narrator and Ligeia, there is no obsession between these two characters. They are simply…Jack and Wendy. Their marriage is going to pot; Danny even knows this due to his shine. On pages forty and forty-one, we see how haunted by his parents wanting a divorce. It’s his living nightmare that sparks his shinings to get worse and his reality will twist into hell when they get to The Overlook. His parents never touch affectionately and grow ever more distant from each other. Jack is unstable and standing on the precipice of insanity even before they arrive at The Overlook from the isolation he feels from his family and from his past relationship with his father. You see, Jack was abused by his father when he was young and Jack is trying to fight becoming that. However, he does injure Danny a few times…though those few times are severe. He breaks Danny’s arm and he slaps him. The breaking of the arm sparked Wendy to go into protective mode…but she still is hesitant to leave Jack because she doesn’t want to go back to her mother’s house where Wendy is not living up to her mother’s expectations. She doesn’t want to leave the man she loves even though he is verbally abusive to her—he threatens to break her ankle and even has malicious thoughts when they are having sex—and physically so with her son.

As said, Jack is also considering divorce and as evidenced on page forty, thinks that he’d be better off that way. However, there is still something there connecting him to Wendy just as there is still something connecting her to him. She knows it’s wrong, she knows he’s rough, she doesn’t know what to do but they’ve been through enough. She is caught in an endless, spiraling cycle of abuse until she finally breaks free with Danny at the end after suffering tremendous injuries from the battle with Jack (who dies at the end of the novel). This is like Poe's narrator's relationship with Ligeia: it is unhealthy for both of them and the only way to escape is through death. "Til death do us part," indeed.

(First Video is for Wendy about Jack. The second is for Jack about Wendy. Ignore the part where he talks about another man)

Brockway, Laurie Sue. Your Interfaith Wedding: A Guide to Blending Faiths, Cultures, and Personal Values into One Beautiful Wedding Ceremony. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2010. 75. eBook.

Steppin' to the Bad Side: The Tell-Tale Heart of the Black Cat

Steppin' to the bad side, ooh, ooh, ooh
Gonna take a mean ride, ooh, ooh, ooh
The smile I had has gone away
Those that steal are gonna pay
Steppin' to the bad side today
I tell ya now, its got to end
No more trustin' them, my friends
We're gonna change our style, change our tone


Steppin' to the bad side, surrendering to the darkness...is every mind truly prone to madness?

This is the question pondered throughout the class session this week.

As we know, every mind is prone to addiction of some kind. Oftentimes this addiction overcomes our free will and we can no longer be accountable for our own actions; we'd do anything for a fix, to silence our all consuming monomania. With addiction we are controlled by our bad choices. Again, our free will is overcome. I think the nature of addiction varies from person to person…but regardless, their free will is always in contention and their choices are always at least partly from the addiction source. Like how one of my grandmother’s relatives recently stole her jewelry while she was sleeping in order to go buy drugs. This raises a new question. Is free will outside the realm of reason?

In The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator makes us question the relationship between addiction and freewill. For not only does the narrator take the eye of his "beloved" cat, Pluto, but he later goes on to hang Pluto, kill his wife, and wall her corpse up in the wall. What drove this sociopath to kill? Was it addiction such as his alcoholism? Or was it some more sinister, deeper issue? Stephen Asma, the visiting author to our school, once said that "we always look for the catalyst behind every wrong-doing." He's right. We truly cannot begin to fathom why someone would do such horrible things for no reason, we don't want to. Why? Because we don't want to start to see that everyone could potentially commit these acts, that we all could have this potential within ourselves. No one wants to admit that they sometimes have bad thoughts, perverse thoughts. This is what makes humans so complex for they have depth of personality. Everyone just simply chooses to see and accept only the personality traits that are lit up with white light; and they choose to shun and condemn those traits that are enshrouded in the depths of the shadows. Poe is a mastermind with how he shows the depth and complexity of human nature. Why? Because he is not afraid to explore what truly lies in the deep waters of our minds. In The Black Cat, Poe explores the nature of perversity and madness within his narrator. The depth of the narrator's perversity is most clearly illustrated on page 232, but also is where the narrator himself ponders this same issue of everyone having perversity within them.

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart--one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself--to offer violence to its own nature--to do wrong for the wrong's sake only---that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute, (Poe 232). 

 The narrator then goes on to kill his wife and wall up her corpse, as I previously stated. Although, the narrator is caught by the police and will pay the consequences of this murder because of "Pluto" for
"[he] had walled the monster up within the tomb," (238). I'm inclined to think that the monster he walled up within the tomb was actually his sanity, his guilt, his remorse, his conscious. This was the same thing that happened in The Tell Tale Heart. The narrator swears that he could hear the beating of the old man's heart beneath the floorboards, when in actuality it was his own imagination, it was his conscious; in The Black Cat it was "Pluto's" cry that gave the murder away, which I interpret as it being his guilt etc that called out to him and overtook him, not the real "Pluto."

Bonus: A visual of a one-eyed cat. AKA my cat: Calcifer Winks.

"Never get out of the boat"

Ok so these guys, Tyler and Jack, walk into a bar and shout to the barman "Hey, Dick! Give us two Essex' and a side of whale, sperm whale."

The bars packed, so the barman is a little slow in getting them their order. They get a little impatient and start making a fuss. Dick, the barman, shouts back at them due to their continued ruckus making, "Jesus, calm it down, Chase and Pollard! You'd think you were about to end up eating each other!"

The bar goes silent. Tyler vanishes all of a sudden and Jack gets up in Dick's face, "Listen here, Moby Dick. First rule about Cannibal Club is 'Never talk about Cannibal Club.'"

Dick goes pale in the face for a moment before grinning and pushing Jack and Tyler's order onto the floor, "Well that ship has already sailed. Guess I just sunk it."

Don't get the joke? Well, I didn't understand how Fight Club and In the Heart of the Sea went together either at first (I just threw in Moby Dick for shiggles so disregard that). As it’s sometimes easier to think of something in terms of something else, let us look at their connection as the “Lost Boy” connection. While this is one of many, it is one that brings about very interesting concepts and metaphors in both the book and the movie. First, let’s analyze Fight Club.

Everyone knows that Peter Pan lives in Neverland, the second star to the right and straight on til morning, and that no one ever grows up there. Fairies and mermaids are real, Indians celebrate their culture with pride and no fear of persecution…every fantasy comes to fruition. It’s a real utopia for all children and for anyone who refuses to grow older. What does Peter Pan have to do with Fight Club you ask? I shall tell you! In Fight Club, Jack ends up living with a man named Tyler. Now see, Tyler has this old, rundown house that he lives in. Everything leaks, the water is disgusting, the floors are treacherous, no one is around for miles…and it holds a power over both Tyler and Jack. It becomes their sanctuary. Here, they have no cares and don’t have to think about the outside world. Their house is their Neverland, and they are the lost boys who inhabit it. They are the boys who have never grown up and who constantly and subconsciously search for their place in the world around them. Tyler releases his hold on adulthood by renouncing thinghood: “The things you own end up owning you,” (Fight Club). This obsession with the material takes Jack a while to let go of, it was an obsession for the longest time while he went about his day simply because he had to and not because he wanted to. He was essentially a thing himself and thusly, was practicing what Sartre calls “bad faith.” It took discovering his own Neverland and discovering his need for emotional release for him to let go and embrace life the way that the lost boys in Peter Pan do. “Let’s stop being perfect and evolve,” Tyler says (Fight Club). He wants to evolve into his true self, to stop trying to be perfect all the time and just live. Which is what Jack both wants and needs (evidenced by the fact that Tyler IS Jack).

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a Neverland. I mean, sure. I know what it’s like to live life as a thing, an automaton, never doing things for yourself but always because you either have to or other people expect it of you. Unfortunately, I’m still there. However, it is through quotes like Tyler’s about the need to evolve instead of being perfect, like Emerson’s about life not being an apology, like Rilke’s “Hiersein ist herrlich” that my want to cease thinghood emerges. I know I’ll never be like Tyler or Jack and completely let go of the need for perfection and the subconscious pull to do things for others instead of yourself, I don’t think myself or my chronic depression would allow that. However, I’m keeping my eye on the horizon and hoping that someday, I can let go and find a Neverland that enables me to let go of this depression.

Which, in a way, is what Pollard does In the Heart of the Sea; he overcomes his forced “survival mode” and forgives both himself and the crew. He finds strength and integrity but most of all, he integrates his experience into who and what he is by even forgiving the whale. He transcends thinghood by getting on a boat again, by living out his life by his own means. He lets the incident go as much as he can, though he does fast on the anniversary of the sinking. Chase on the other hand, does not let it go. In fact, he profits from the tragedy and sensationalizes it (Phillbrick 205). He lets the tragedy rule him and never gets on a boat again. He never escapes his survivor mode and remains a lost boy for the rest of his days. Unlike Pollard who left behind his days as a lost boy yet still found his Neverland status by accepting what happened as a tragic accident and moving on with life. Whereas Chase, along with never letting it go, does not accept what happened as an accident and tries to place the blame on someone or something to excuse it and to escape his role in the tragedy. "Chase began to wonder what "unaccountable destiny or design" had been at work. It almost seemed as if something--could it have been God?--had possessed the beast for its own strange, unfathomable purpose. Whatever or whoever might be behind it, Chase was convinced that "anything but chance" had sunk the Esssex," (89).

In the story of In the Heart of the Sea, Pollard and Chase’s status as lost boys parallels their feelings to the aftermath of the sinking and their troubling memories. Letting go of something is perhaps one of the hardest things to do, especially a memory, which is how Pollard is able to escape being a lost boy and become found. I don’t think I could ever let go of my troubling memories, especially the ones concerning my father. I don’t think I could ever let go of the fear, the hurt, the hatred, and the dejection; I don’t think I could ever let go of my feelings of inadequacy from his leaving. However, unlike Chase, I’m not going to let my troubling memories rule me and I’m going to continue to believe in “hiersein ist herrlich” if it’s the last thing I do.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate...

...Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." (quote as taken from Coach Carter but it is originally said by Maryanne Williamson with some word changes.)

Suzanne brought up this quote in class when we were discussing Ahab and how he is not afraid of his power. But let us put Moby Dick aside for a moment and focus on this quote and Self-Reliance by Emerson. "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." But what is our power and why are we trained to see our greatest fears as fears of inadequacy instead of supremacy? I think I know why. I think that in this world of oppression and privilege, the privileged cannot afford for those who are oppressed to see their own power for then there would be equality. Now you may be thinking that equality is what everyone truly wants. I'm going to burst your bubble and tell you that is not the case. The white man doesn't want equality for that means he no longer benefits because of his gender and his race. The heterosexual woman doesn't want equality because then she would no longer reap the benefits of being heterosexual in a world where heterosexuality is the norm. Deep down inside us all, it is this way. But systems of oppression and privilege are not simply black and white, there is grey area as well. This is what we call intersectionality. All these areas of oppression work together in the world of systems. The world of systems training people to see themselves as inadequate and to lose sight of their own power and to recognize it only in those "chosen" ones. But there is a secret...the oppressed are aware of their power as well. But they are afraid of upsetting the social norm by exerting this power. But who says that only the privileged get to exercise the right of setting what we call the social norm? That's bullshit. "We are all meant to shine." "Your playing small does not serve the world." Movements for empowerment are their own worst enemies for they acknowledge the inadequacy of having something called "the social norm," they acknowledge that people are seen as inadequate, yet they only think that they are aware of their power. I say they in terms of the small groups of people who do rise up to try and take back the power that was stripped away from them. Because in the grand scheme of things, the majority of those who are oppressed either just don't acknowledge it, or they accept it. People need to learn that this acceptance is wrong.

People must understand that "[their] life is not an apology, but a life" (Emerson 1163). They must understand that in order to take power back as a whole, they must first take back the power of their own selves and their own identity. We can even scale this down onto a more personal battlefield and look at this in terms of personal identity and personal expression. Day by day we are surrounded by advertisements, media, etc that tell us what we should look like, what we should act like... There is largely nothing out there saying that those who aren't beautiful are just as important as those that are. There is largely nothing out there saying that to be overweight is ok. "Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed, does not" (1176). Society continues to live on, but the damage that it does lives on, its ideals live on. This is "the other terror that scares us from self-trust" it "is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them" (1164).  This causes people to live inside self-created masks and to learn to hate themselves, rather than to love themselves. Emerson disagrees with this practice whole-heartedly. For he believes that "If we live truly, we shall see truly" (1168). He also believes that "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself" (1176).

I know, I know. Easier said than done right? I'm right there with you, readers. For the longest time I have thought myself inadequate, have hated my looks because I'm not like everyone else, hated my weight because its not what society wants it to be...I've been there. I've been there all my life because of my subconscious daddy issues. Hell, I'm still there. But believe me, the best thing you could ever do is to listen to Emerson and live your own life. Don't get wrapped up in what society wants you to be and what they want you to look like and act like...Just don't. It leads you down a road that no one should ever go down and trust me, no one wants to have to take medication for the rest of their life or find themselves in heaven in a white robe, attempting to play the harp, and trying to see if your halo can act as an antenna so that you can hear who got kicked off The Bachelor. No. I have not died before. I'm just trying to lighten the mood in order to drive my point home. We all have to learn, as Emerson says, that "to be great is to be misunderstood" (1165). "[Our] life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine" (1163). Our life should be OUR life. Not anyone else's. ESPECIALLY not anyone else's for copying someone or trying to be someone you are not is still hiding yourself away. "...imitation is suicide" (1160). This is what Emerson has taught me both through reading and discussing Self-Reliance. This is the way I am going to try and live from now on. Through his words and through Rilke's "Hiersein ist herrlich." For to be here now is glorious.

Now. Repeat after me, reader.

"I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I must be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions...I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly" (1170).

For "love takes off masks that we cannot live without and know we cannot live within" (Baldwin). So love yourself.

But don't become so obsessed with it that it takes over your entire world. Don't pull an Ahab. Think, what would Yojo do? (Yojo is the idol that Queequeg worships). No seriously, I mean it. Don't let loving yourself become your white whale. Just let your intuition guide you, let those epiphanies of emotion that come when your are unsure, push you up to the surface of the water you've felt you were drowning under all along. For if you love yourself too much, you will lose sight of teaching others to do the same. Like how Ahab lost sight of his crew due to his obsession with Moby, how he lost sight of life in general due to his hubris.  Like how in that one magician movie...Either The Illusionist or The Prestige (I get them mixed up all the time) The Great Danton becomes obsessed in finding out another magician's secrets to the point where it costs him everything. Just as Ahab lost everything to Moby, his leg, his ship, his crew...his life. Don't lose your life to obsession. Lose your life to love.

Anyway. That's all for now. Make it work and auf wiedersehen.