Summation of the class

This is the end, the twilight of our class. And I can't help but feel like I'm dying. I kid you not, as I was staring blankly at this white screen, these words came through my headphones:
 "Our bodies are prisons for our souls. Our sin and blood the iron bars of confinement, but fear not. All flesh decays. Death claims all to ash. And thus death frees every soul."
I was watching The Fountain earlier today and paused it prior to this dialogue. At the mention of death, it inexplicably resumed playing to comfort me in my grief. It seems I had forgotten that "Death is the road to awe" and likewise "the mother of beauty." The death of this class will give birth to a new life. And I'll have the previous life to draw upon as I progress through subsequent cycles.

This semester, most of my classes have been a prison to my soul. I've been barred by structure and trivialities and appeasement. But amidst the incarceration I've had this class to keep me grounded in the profound. We covered life and death and what it means to be human, and I couldn't ask for a better edification. Referential mania has me by the hair and I have not the capacity to express the scope of these details and the depth in which they relate to my life, but I'm on my way. I've gained a pretty decent foundation. Not all transformation requires pain. This class is evidence of that. Thank you to all of you who have contributed to the basis for my self-actualization. And a special thanks to Professor Sexson. Man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of Professor Sexson.   

My life as a mythic detective

           It starts and ends with dust. And how fitting that my mythic story would be demarcated by dust, for dust I am, and unto dust shall I return (Genesis 3:19). Prior to my inception, prior to my metaphorical death and rebirth, I was blind. Then I saw through a glass darkly, but now I see face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12). I have been baptized in dust, the doors of perception are cleansed, and I have scarcely begun to see things as they are (William Blake).

            Anyway, like I said, it started with dust. I can tell you the exact day in which it all began. It was January 17, 2013, and I can state this with confidence because I have the syllabus to prove it. The assigned reading that ushered me into my career as a mythic detective entailed a comparison of a passage from Book 18 of the Illiad with a poem by Christopher Logue found in his work titled War Music. I didn’t know it then, but this comparison follows the paradigm on which my mythic career is founded. This comparison expertly presents a displacement emulating the concept that myth “is the precedent behind every action, its invisible, ever-present lining (Robert Calluso). Both works deal with Achilles’ grief following the death of Patroclus. Both works deal with the dust that accompanies his grief. Whether presented by Homer—“In both hands he caught up the grimy dust, and poured it over his head and face, and fouled his handsome countenance, and the black ashes were scattered over his immortal tunic”— or Logue—“Down on your knees, Achilles, Farther down. / Now forward on your hands and put your face into the dirt, / And scrub it to and fro”— the dust is integral to the grievance. I did not see it then, but now I see with gross clarity the significance of this displacement. The world spoke to me, but I did not listen. I could not listen; I had not the faculties at the time. I could not discern the recursive structure. I could not see that the story in Logue’s story hinted at yet another story—my story. But the veil has been lifted and now I see.

It’s all so clear in retrospect. The clues begin to pile up. The real trick is recognizing those clues in the present, but we are slaves to the irreversible progress of time. Now, as the tide of time pushes me forward, a riptide brings me back. With 20/20 hindsight, I render the myth of Annabel Lee.

Over 9 years ago, I decided upon the name that sealed my dog’s fate. I derived her name from a poem in which one in her youth is unfairly robbed of life. Edgar Allan Poe understood the tragedy of a premature death, and he likely learned it from mythology. I know I learned it from mythology. In the future, I’ll be more cautious when deciding upon names. I’ll consider the weight of the name and the history it carries. I won’t make the same mistake.   

On January 14, “my dog heaved, the sound hauntingly guttural as if her insides were being wrenched from her body. Out came meat and bile and breath and life. Thrice my dog performed the ritual, staining my carpet with sallow fluid. What was the message? Was she possessed by the gods? And what were they trying to tell me with this purge? Even now, I contemplate the significance of this omen.” I posted these very words on my blog, and yet failed to realize their significance until just recently.

When Annabel started puking, I didn’t think much of it. I figured it was a minor illness, but the puking persisted. After a few more days of vomiting, I took her to the vet. Her temperature read 103.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Fever. “It’s probably just a virus,” Dr. Smart told me. “It could either be something really insignificant or something really bad. We’re going to put her on metranidazole, but if her condition doesn’t improve bring her back in.” Her condition didn’t improve, but then I saw what I perceived to be the light. At that point, I was experimenting with reading mythic clues, and I was certain I had uncovered something.

I was listening to My 103.5FM, and I heard John Tesh say, “Keep your animal away from raw fish. Many kinds of fish have a parasite that digs into the dog’s intestinal lining and causes vomiting, fever and inflames the lymph nodes. Vets call it ‘Fish Disease,’ and it can kill a dog within two weeks if left untreated.” Vomiting. Fever. And then the most amazing thing happened. I remembered Annabel eating raw salmon from Alaska a few weeks prior.

The clues were too clear, the synchronicity too telling. The vomiting, the fever, her temperature reading numerically equating to the radio station. I knew in that moment that she had salmon disease and that the illness would soon be behind us. After arranging for and administering her treatment, I found that her symptoms persisted.

Blind to the disease spreading through her body, I held on to mystic beliefs. I was certain her outcome depended on my attentiveness to the world’s message, certain that if I slowed down and listened, I would successfully interpret the omens surrounding her illness, but I prophesied poorly. I was blind like Tiresias without the compensatory prophetic ability.

Following the failed treatment, an ultrasound revealed the true affliction— black and white shadows of her insides and a darkness that didn’t belong. I wanted to search into the recesses of her body and find the wretch that assailed her. I wanted to cut it out. I wanted to reach inside and sever it from her liver. But like the hopeless prisoners in Plato’s cave, I was bound, fixed to a position in which I could only watch the shadows before me.

            Seeing her torment but helpless to alleviate it, I was struck by the illusion of proximity. I could place my hand against her flesh, practically clutch the cancer inside, and yet remain from it an un-traversable distance. Like Tantalous, relief from suffering was in sight, but reprieve remained an impossibility. The situation was fixed by the limitations of science. On the other hand, maybe science facilitated something that wasn’t meant to be. Maybe it allowed me to look upon that which was not meant to be looked upon akin to the myths of Semele and Zeus or Orpheus and Eurydice. But I looked, and I met suffering just the same.

            Aware of the cancer inside, the next step was surgery. I scheduled her surgery to take place the following day. That morning the doctor ran her bloodwork and found all the signs and symbols of cancer that were inexplicably absent in her previous bloodwork. The numbers told the story of my worst fears coming true. One of the counts read 66. It was her blood platelet count. One more repeating digit, and I may have had a revelation right there in the waiting room. I might have recognized the apocalypse of Annabel Lee. But I didn’t.  

            Even worse than my misinterpretation of that sign is the fact that I have a disease that causes my body to destroy my blood platelets. Because of this, I’ve visited the hospital countless times to monitor my blood platelet count. Having endured weekly visits to the phlebotomists, the suspense of waiting on bloodwork, and 2 blood transfusions, I know what constitutes normal range, and I know that 66 is far below normal. If only it were possible for one to be transplanted into my body at that instant—to be inside my head, looking through my eyes, feeling the years of my experience stamped upon me—only then could one begin to understand the impact of that number. It hit me, but not hard enough because€, although I knew the risk of internal bleeding, I failed to acknowledge it.  

            Annabel had to receive a blood transfusion prior to the surgery, a transmigratory fragment of a soul. The dog donating the blood was named Mud. I am forever grateful for that Mudblood. The blood dripped like sand in an hourglass, prolonging the moments I feared were our last. After the final drop, I had to go to the waiting room while her surgery commenced.

            In the waiting room, a blind cairn terrier was ushered in by her owners. The dog was straight out of The Wizard of Oz. I must have been even blinder than the dog to have missed the clue that followed. Because she was blind, her owners had her euthanized. That dog was the true Tiresias. That dog foretold the event that was soon to come. She moved the curtain, revealing that which is behind. And still, I failed to see.

            After Bel’s surgery, her vet brought me into her office to explain the hopelessness of the situation. I stared fixatedly as she scrolled through pictures of the surgery while medical jargon floated about the room. I knew the message before she said a word. I could see it in her glossy eyes. What interested me were the pictures of Bel’s insides. They looked like a sunset, hues of purple, red, and orange coalescing into a portrait of otherworldly beauty. I looked away and noticed something, the only clue that struck me at the time. It was a single peacock feather resting upright in a jar.

            I thought of Hera and her faithful guardian, Argos, and about how she was stripped of him against her will. And that thought quickly evolved into ruminating on the Odyssey. I thought about how Argos is also the name of Odysseus’s faithful hound. Argos awaits Odysseus’s return for 20 years, and only when he recognizes Odysseus’s arrival does he die. While gazing upon that peacock feather, Bel’s vet told me the following: “There is no explanation for why her blood work a couple weeks ago didn’t show anything. I’ve never seen this happen so fast before. My only explanation is that dogs, even more so than humans, compensate when they’re sick. They’ll compensate until they can’t anymore.”

            Annabel had to stay with the vet for hours after her surgery, but later that night, shortly after I picked her up, she began to bleed to death internally. I could literally witness the swelling of her stomach as the blood poured out uncontrollably. This again presented the illusion of proximity. I could see it and yet I was helpless to stop it. The blood hourglass was finally revealing that her time was up. I rushed her to the vet’s house and she euthanized her right there in her living room. I could see the life flicker and depart from her. My image reflected back at me, I saw the life depart from me.

I went home and I got to thinking. I thought about that peacock feather. I thought about how Bel began to bleed internally only a couple hours after we were reunited, and I began to wonder if she had been waiting for me, faithful until the end, hanging onto life until my return. I found solace in that thought. I find solace even now as I am writing this.

When I contemplated moving back to Bozeman, one of the most crucial factors I considered was the amount of time it would allow me to spend with Annabel Lee. I was working too much in San Diego, and I knew that in going to school, I would be allotted a lot more free time to give Annabel the life she deserved. When she died, this made me bitter. I thought about how unfair it was that she would be stripped away from me when I had only briefly been given the opportunity to make the most of our time together. Now I understand why I am here. If not for my immersion in mythic clues, I might not have developed this method of interpreting life differently. I may not have had the faculties to cope with the loss of something to which I had devoted myself wholeheartedly.

            Sometimes when the world is silent and I’m alone with my thoughts, all the pieces seem to line up. Synchronicity will strike so deeply that I will see all the convoluted intricacies of the world operating before for me with utter clarity. I will feel all of human history flowing through me, and I will realize that the world is bigger than me, that I am but a fragment comprising the big picture. Moments like this, I see Annabel and know that she too is a part of that big picture. Moments like this, I know I’ll see her again.

            I started reading “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot the other day. It’s a work wrought with mythic clues, too many for me to get into at the time of my reading, but the single thing that stood out to me was the following line: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” I keep Annabel’s ashes in a box on my nightstand. When I received them, I grabbed a handful and watched as the dust trickled and fell through my fingers. I beheld what she had become. But I know now that that isn’t her. I know now that in dying we are not merely consigned to dust. The dust no longer frightens me. She has transcended the material world and we will meet again. 

 

Displacement

While Alex--or Alexis, or whoever he is--sits in the waiting room at Mt. San Rafael hospital, world renowned for its innovative surgeons and their breakthroughs in gender reassignment surgery, he can’t help but wonder what he is doing there. As he stares blankly at the glass double doors with a decal emblem of the caduceus situated in the center, he remembers the last time he walked through those doors, splitting the caduceus in half as he made his exit. At that point he hadn’t received the gender reassignment surgery he so longed for, but he did leave as a woman.

As a prerequisite to the surgery, he had to assume the role of a female, his target gender, for a year. For a full year, he endured the agony of high heels, the constriction of an over-stuffed bra, and the gawks from both sexes who collectively decided there was a latent masculinity belying his feminine façade. He suffered through the year so he could undergo the true transformation he was certain would alleviate his uncertainties regarding gender and self. He thought that by inverting himself, creating a void to fill his emptiness, he might restore balance to the body which he perceived to be perfectly alien to him.  

                Sitting in the waiting room of the world-renowned hospital, his year has passed. He is moments away from the big surgery, and he is suddenly struck with an epiphany. Examining himself as if from outside himself, like an apparition separate from his body, he sees someone more alien to him than his previously masculine visage. He looks at the plum-red lipstick, the eye shadow, the cover-up’s futile attempt to mask the wiry black hairs sprouting like spider legs on his face, and he begins to detest the image. At the sudden loss of uncertainty, he resolves to leave through the double doors, stripping the femininity from himself as he again splits the caduceus in half.    

                Alex is overcome with a sense of calm as he drives away from the hospital. He finally sees himself. He laughs as he catches a glimpse of his blue eyes in the rearview mirror of his Toyota Camry. They are heavily laden with green eye shadow, and the more he looks at them, the more they appear as the eyes on the feathers of a peacock. As if coming down with a case of Stendhal syndrome, he fixes his eyes on his eyes. Still driving, however, he slams into the back of a truck stopped at a red light in front of him.

                Upon impact, his airbag deploys, but a malfunction in the deployment of the airbag causes it to eject at nearly twice the normal speed. With eyes wide open, the impact causes both of his eyes to rupture, resulting in immediate blindness. Blood pours out from his vacant eye sockets, mingling with his green eye shadow. He appears as Oedipus after he gouged out his eyes with his mother’s brooch. And like Oedipus, he finally sees the truth.

Symbols and Signs, O's and Zeroes

"You are turning the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero."
I can't recall how many times I've turned the letter 'o' thinking it was a zero. Sometimes I'll do it multiple times, getting the same results, never realizing that I have tunnel vision and that the results I desire can be achieved by simply recognizing that I need to try turning a different symbol. Usually by the time I realize this, it's too late. I'm speaking metaphorically of course. But this seems to happen throughout Greek mythology, particularly in tragedies. Consider Oedipus for example. Attempting to avoid the oracle's prophecy, Oedipus proceeds down a path he believes will thwart his prophesied fate, but in doing so he seals it. He turned an 'o' when he should have been turning a zero. Maybe the father in this story has done the same thing. He chose the method he thought was best fit for his son's well being. He chose the 'o.' Then when he realizes that he should have been turning the zero, the story leads the reader to believe that it is too late, that his son's fate is sealed.
I think this story presents the reader with a juxtaposition of the consequences of looking too deeply into the mythic clues in life alongside the failure to look into those clues. Neither result in a favorable outcome. To interpret the mythic clues just the right amount is vague and intangible, but failure to try to interpret the clues is worse.  

Shattered Rituals

I never noticed the ritualistic nature of my life until I was confronted with the absence of those rituals. My dog--my best friend for the last 9 years--died yesterday. All of our daily rituals were shattered in an instant. In retrospect, I realize this shattering occurred gradually though, like a nick on my car windshield that expands slowly from the origin with web-like projections until the structure is too weak and the slightest stress fragments it into an incalculable number of incongruous shards. The nick was the loss of Bel's appetite. She wouldn't eat, so I ceased the ritual of rising from bed at six, habitually scooping her food into her bowl, and taking her outside to pee. The ritual wasn't completely lost though. It transferred into the administration of pills, the medicine I hoped might keep her alive. Every twelve hours I gave her the pills, disguising them in peanut butter until the peanut butter no longer offered enticement, and then resorted to placing them in the back of her thoat and forcing her mouth shut until she swallowed. No more 7am and 4pm feeding because the exercise became futile.

After a while, she became too weak to walk or play. I'd say to her, "You wanna go for a walk Bellee? Go for a walk?" but her ears would no longer perk up at the sound of the word. She would no longer "sit pretty," resting precariously on her hind legs with her front paws raised in the air, while I clasped the lease around her collar. Eventually, I had to carry her up and down the stairs for her to use the restroom because any excess of impact could irritate her hemangiosarcoma, causing her to bleed to death internally.

 I see now that the loss of my rituals were also the loss of hers'. Rituals are important to a dog. They operate as a cycle of expectation and fulfillment. She lost the expectation and the fulfillment followed. Knowing that she would soon die, I ceased the rituals of bathing, brushing, and clipping her nails. She detested these things. They made her feel helpless. I wanted her end days to contain the modicum of joy that had been relegated to her in her condition.

The only rituals that never ceased were the kiss goodbye and the late night cuddling. Each day before class, I continued to kiss her goodbye, and receive at least one lick on the cheek before I left. "One kiss, one kiss, Bellee," I'd repeat until I got that one half-hearted flick of the tongue. When she got home for surgery, and no entreaty would be rewarded with a kiss, I should have known that all hope was lost. Until her last day, Bel and I would continue to sleep together, her little body cuddled up between my legs. When she was in too fragile to be engulfed by my legs, I crawled to her spot on the bed and laid with my arm curved around her emaciated form. This is how we slept on the night before her death.

I sleep alone now. I get no kisses goodbye, and I'm no longer greeted with her gaze and a couple licks when I get home. For this reason, I've left my house once, and I don't want to return. All hope is gone. All rituals are lost. This is an initiation devoid of rituals.

The Scream and Run

I had a special guest presentation in my writing class today, and the guests spoke about Native American games. It was interesting to find that the games were not so concerned with competition and victory as our games today, but they were about social roles, memory, coordination, cooperation, mental acuity, visual recognition, and fitness. These speakers hinted at Native American mythology, and the role of games in their stories, but they unfortunately did not elaborate too much. One thing they mentioned was a race between man and buffalo to see who would populate the world. They did not name the winner, but it seems that it was a race of endurance, and man evidently won. In regard to endurance, they had us perform a game called the scream and run. This game involves screaming and running simultaneously while carrying a stick, and if either one activity stops, the game is over. It is used to develop stamina and lung capacity.

They suggest someone from class volunteer to do it across campus. Classes are just getting out, so a crowd of students flood the area in which we are convened. No volunteers. "See, this is why I said earlier that psychology is involved," the male guest speakers says. "We present this game to kids and they are all about it, but you college students are a little too cool, a little more reserved." A challenge. An initiation. I accept, grabbing the sharpened wooden stick and setting down my backpack. I start my sprint, screaming at the top of my lungs, running through groups of people turning their heads in amazement and disdain. They don't know what I'm doing. They don't know about the psychological barriers I'm deconstructing. After about 50 yards, my lungs give out, and I bring my run to a halt. I start back through the crowd, and hear someone say, "Yeah, you look like a faggot." It's a female voice. No chance to put the verbal assailant in her place. There would be no gain in the action anyway. These people who think and act like this are not my peers. Their opinions are of little consequence. It's unfortunate we live in this world in which ego is more important than initiation, though. I'm happy to have damaged my ego in participating in this initiation. I will be better because of it.

I get closer to my class congregation and I'm greeted by clapping and hollering. I feel a sense of pride, satisfaction, and unity. These are my peers.

Unity, Separation, and Transcendence

I was checking out Autumn's blog, looking at one of the repeating motifs in creation myths, and I read "The mother and father of the world being so close together that nothing can separate them (until their offspring do)." I noticed this motif in the presentations, but something about reading this, perhaps the way in which it is worded, sparked a revelation. I see in this passage an archetype that permeates history and is especially relevant today. I see an inseparable couple, rapturous and full of glee, who are transformed after childbirth. I think about my mom and dad separating, and I wonder how much my birth affected their once happy union. Is this an archetype derived from irrational fear or did it result from examining the changes in parents' relationships post-childbirth? Undoubtedly, the introduction of children complicates things. The love previously guaranteed to a single individual must then be allocated to multiple individuals. Attention is divided, and the parents' lives as they knew them are essentially over.
Maybe this isn't a bad thing, though. After all, in our creation myths, it is the separation of the parents that leads to eventual creation of the world. This can be applied to the individual. Maybe it is the separating ourselves from selfish desires and surrendering ourselves to something else that allows for something transcendent to occur.