Regaining Consciousness

I have a plaque above my writing desk that says, “Sometimes I think I understand everything, then I regain consciousness.”
It touches on the idea of knowing everything and nothing, of being everyone and no one. Roberto’s blog entry proclaims the same idea, when we dig deeper we realize we know nothing at all. It’s easy to be affected with ourselves, our lives, our ideas. Then I read Psalm 8 for a reality check: “What is man that thou are mindful of him?” Or as Turner says, the human world is “but a quintessence of dust.” He describes the terror in such nakedness of mind–“…the soul confronts the essential zero at its core.” Could this be Eliot’s zero summer? I think so.
The School of Night was born in a time of great suffering, as creative genius often is. So these men gather, eschewing the distractions of the world and relationship. And what do they find? Without relationship they are stripped to their cores. Funny, that.
Shakespeare well understood the seeming futility of the human condition.
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Whew, caustic words, but inspiring to many, including Faulkner.

Interesting that without people to reflect their image back to them, there was a crisis in The School of Night. A black hole of self reflection turning inward, “until the self yearns to be rid of itself.” Kenosis. Think Samuel Beckett. And so the good ‘ol boys wrote sonnets to reclaim themselves, to find beauty again.

Enter–women. Oh, the quote from Love’s Labor Lost-

“Now, for not looking on a woman’s face, You have in that forsworn the use of eyes…” Man. The passion of Shakespeare is unrivaled. He really ‘gets’ women.

I laughed when Prof. Sexson talked about the Pieta and the Mythic Woman. I was remembering when my daughter, at four or five years old, drew pictures of our family. She always drew my husband very small and she portrayed me as absolutely enormous. My husband was not amused as he is tall. My sister, an art therapist, said it was how my daughter viewed us. I was a ‘huge’ person in her life at that age. My husband was working a great deal and not as present, hence small. I guess my daughter ascribed to the ‘Mythic Momma.’

I see the beginnings of Sociology in Shakespeare.  

Professor Sexson quoted Wallace Stevens–“And what we said of it became a part of what it is.” This is self-fulfilling prophecy at its finest. (And this, also, is the act of writing.)

1. “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

1. Sounds like Symbolic Interactionism and the idea that we create our own reality. And Cooley’s Looking Glass Self was curiously proven in The School of Night. With no ‘reflection’ what was there? A black hole.

   But they found their way out by writing.

The blogs have been great, superlative. Witty James says,

“Kill Bill.”

Shakespeare’s words slay us, over and over.

They seek us, find us, kill us and breathe life into our dust again.