APotAaaYM I

Legendary American musician Frank Zappa once said:

If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

This is pretty much the sentiment I had after reading the section that was assigned for Thursday discussion. I call myself a Roman Catholic but I do not go to church (unless it is a major holiday or am otherwise forced to go), I do not confess my sins to anyone other than those innocent whom I have done wrong to, and I do not place any money in the donation basket (not because I don't want to, but because being an unemployed college student it is retroactive to my cause to tithe on a weekly or montly basis.). But if I ever told my mother that I was having a confusion of faith, she'd most likely just smack me upside the head and tell me to snap out of it. Yes, I do believe in a God, but not necessarily the "Catholic" god who likes to rain fire and brimstone. I mean, how can you not believe in some kind of higher being? Okay, sure, coming from a purely scientific point of view, we evolved from lesser life forms into what we are today, but where did we, as lesser beings, come from? It is almost ignorant to explain away God (or what have you) with a purely scientific approach because if you do that, how can you explain supernatural phenomena like ghosts, spirits, and anything "otherworldly"?

Well, that was a tangent that I didn't mean to go on, but there you have it.

What I mean to say is that while I can understand and argue in favor of Joyce choosing to drag on for multiple pages of having father Arnell preaching and talking to the retreatees, I just felt that he could make his point in some other, more interesting, way. Perhaps a dream sequence? Maybe not, but I'm just brainstorming at random. If Joyce wants to make a case against religion, he could have done it in a completely different way other than boring the reader to tears and causing him/her to skip entire pages of religious babble and bobble.

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One thing I found interesting and worthy of talking about probably has an obvious end-point but is interesting nonetheless. Let's take the idea that Joyce wants to say something about religion (more specifically Catholicism) and how it's wrong and what have you, blah, blah, blah. Got that? Okay, good. If Joyce wants to make some kind of statement about the aforementioned, then why does he choose to add to that statement in such a silly way? Things like "Saint" and "Catholic" as well as "Catholicism" and other words akin to religion are all knowingly left uncapitalized. This choice thus makes the words seem unimportant and meaningless except at face value. While if this was intentional I can completely understand the choice he made, I just don't see any real value in doing something so trivial. But, and this is a big but, this may be completely unintentional on the author's part and a mere capitalization error that went unchecked by the editor and his assistant, Billy (assuming that the editor has an assistant and he is male). I may be right on either account because sometimes I can make out the point in the smallest things but I can also looking way too far into the aforementioned smallest things and make mountains out of molehills.

For example, do you remember the DeLorean from the Back to the Future movies, as it thrust itself into the space-time continuum and drove at 88mph to some point either forward or back in time? Yeah that's a penis.

3/13 - Yeats Poem

In regards to "Easter, 1916," I thought this poem was good, though it required a few readings to really get my feelings about it to solidify.

The first stanza, I thought, was very interesting, even if you crop it out of the poem and leave it by itself to stand alone. Just reading the first few lines reminded me of the banality of life - you see dozends/hundreds/thousands of people every day, and even though you may not know the majority of them, social norms have placed a requirement in you to say something nice to at least a handful of people who you lock gazes with. Of course, Yeats sums up the sentiment of these salutations when he describes them as "Polite meaningless words," because most of the time you really do not mean what you say to these seemingly unknown "vivid faces" you meet in the course of this "casual comedy." (of course, this standalone verse paragraph would be suspect to inquiry when the last two lines are read/spoken aloud)

The second stanza was filled with mixed messages and contradictory sentiments. For instance, even in the second line. the phrase "ignorant good-will" is an oxymoron which, by definition, is a phrase which has words that are in opposition of themselves. Also, Yeats describes a man who was "so sensitive" and "so daring and sweet [in] his thought" - someone who he seems to admire - but then goes on to call him a "drunken, vanglorious lout." He seems to have a certain admiration for someone who apparently has a severe drinking problem and isn't quite up there on the intelligence ladder. Melding together what I know about the subject matter from the poem, Yeats here is saying that even though this man did not get along with the poet in his personal life, what he did for the good of the country outweighs that and he deserves to be honored.

The third stanza I'm not really sure about. I mean, I know that it's obviously a part of this poem, but I wonder why Yeats shifts his worldview from something so bleak to something so wholly naturalistic in its simplicity. Not only does this stanza shift in content, it is the only stanza which does not end with the phrase "a terrible beauty is born," and instead ends with "The stone's in the midst of it all."

The fourth and final stanza is an unfortunate culmination and melancholy which pains the heart to read. Through all the turmoil that went on this first stanzas, for the revolution to fail at its most dire point is a sad thing to think about. All those who died, and the four Yeats names specifically, deserve to be remembered in the history of Ireland because they died for what they believed was the right thing to do. Thinking about these brave Irishmen gets me thinking about our own revolution some 233 years ago - those noble men who died in service of what wasn't even a country yet. They stood up for what they believed was right - to free our nation from the stranglehold of the British - and many of them died, not necessarily swiftly either, for it. Even the soldiers who are in Iraq now are noble and should be honored for what they're doing - we wanted to free a country from its tyrant of a leader and what do we get in return? Car bombs, IEDs, video-recorded decapitations. I could go on but I don't think I should go further because this post would probably get less and less coherent as I go.

Anyways, the point is that men (and women) who stand up for what they believe is right sometimes pay the ultimate price and give of themselves the most noble sacrifice, whether they necessarily want to or not - it is our duty to remember them in the annals of time and think of them not as who they were, but who they want to be known as - revolutionaries.