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| My Secluded Place | ||||||||||||
| My sacred place of seclusion and relaxation is my car. In my car I can go where I want to go and listen to what I want to listen to. True, I have to obey the traffic laws when I'm driving around town, but I can handle that. What I can do with the car is nothing compared to what the car is. As Capitan Jack Sparrow said, "what a ship is, what the Black Pearl is, is freedom," and though my car is definately not as grand as a pirates' ship it is freedom. The fact that I seldom take advantage of the ability to just go and leave the world behind is not as important as having that ability. | ||||||||||||
| The Class of Demytholoization | ||||||||||||
| We keep discussing in class how everything is mythical in one way or another, everything has a mythical side. Then we proceed to standardize the myths until they are no more than an eloquent or mundane retelling of the same story. Sure this is the study of myth, meaning we are taking all of the mystery out of once magical tales. A few years ago I experienced some serious demytholization when I lived in Florida. I had the opportunity to work for Disney and it was an enjoyable experience. However, in seeing how the "Disney Magic" works, it lost its magical effect on me. Now I still appreciate the imaginations behind the parks and the illusions that can be quite convincing, but they have lost their mystical powers. Surpisingly I do not find the same distruction of myth in science, because no matter how much you learn and discover there is always more, always an outlier that defies all reason and modern thought. What we know we know we know and what we don't know we don't know and don't claim to know. This mythology class on the other hand doesn't claim to know anything, but standardises everything. Perhaps it is the Disney rolling through, but I dissagree with jamming everything into one mold and reducing a centaur to a large man on a small pony. At the beginning of class we were told that we would get a more mythical view of the world and those in it. That is not what I have found. All we are doing is going through the myths of the world and systematically stripping them of both their culture and magic. I see the patterns and common stories in them, but you know if I had to choose between being an ignorant commoner with hundreds of colorful myths or an educated cynic with one drab myth I would definately chose the commoner. | ||||||||||||
| Heros and Repetition | ||||||||||||
| In most of the hero stories we have read or talked about in class there has been a strong element of repetition. The repetition may be in the method of preserving the story and keeping the focus of the audience on the main goal of the hero's mission rather than letting them get lost in each of the hero's exploits. In the stories of Hiawatha and Kutoyis the catchy phrases common in oral tradition are especially conspicuous at the end of each trial they face. In Hiawatha, the description of Modamin is repeated every time he appears or is remembered thereby linking the story of Hiawatha with the origins of maize. In Kutoyis, after every one of his heroic deeds he asks those he saved where he could find more people in an effort to save them from whatever trouble they might have. Perhaps the same phrases are not repeated in every hero story, but the same idea is generally presented at each turning point in the tale. | ||||||||||||
| The Snake's Motion | ||||||||||||
| When we watched the Campbell video dealing with the snakes I was intreaged by the motion of the cobra the priestess kissed. It was always waving back and forth like a reed in the wind and never where it was the moment before. It was amazingly similar to the "internal snakes" that Campbell was talking about because the snakes in our character are elusive and never identical to the way they were the last time we saw them. | ||||||||||||