2010.10.08
Days Remaining: 234
1. Though we had nothing so severe as the rains and flooding in my home state of Delaware, the weather in my current neck of the woods has been gray and overcast, with intermittent showers and downpours, for over a week. That is, until last night, when the clouds began to break. This morning dawned clear and bright, and there are strong, though gentle, breezes. This is one of my favorite types of weather, and in good time, too. I've got my one tiny window and my sliding glass door wide open with the fan on my AC wall unit blowing in, and my little floor fan blowing out. My apartment had been feeling very close, air-wise, and smelled kind of stale (its size and lack of windows on more than one wall means that air does not circulate much at all). So now it's as wide-open as I can make it, and the difference is noticeable, both in terms of ambient feel and underlying, almost sub-conscious, scent. Much better!
2. I went back to Providence yesterday to retrieve the divorce documents and mail them to the sheriff who will serve them to my ex-wife. Once again, the lack of clear instruction struck: I had prepared stamped envelopes for mailing the documents based upon what I was told, but then discovered that the "successfully served" form is to be mailed back to me, not the RI family court, which meant I had to go find a new envelope, go to the Post Office (as opposed to using the mail box directly next to the court building), and mail it from there. This is not a problem, as such, but annoying because it's not what I was first told. On top of that, when I arrived to get the forms, they had been misfiled and a clerk had to dig through a pile of cases to find mine. It took her 10 minutes, but now the whole thing is as done as I can make it. The actual court proceedings are scheduled, because Murphy rules all, at 9am the morning after my birthday. At least this means that the process should be finished by New Years.
3. For the past few weeks I've been corresponding with my friend, Silvanus, a professor of ancient history, about a sort-of academic author whose work we have both been reading over the years. This author is a trained classicist who wrote several excellent books on ancient Greek philosophy, but who has clearly moved onto a new phase of his expertise, becoming a mystical actualization guru. This development is all the more intriguing because he remains a classicist and uses ancient texts as part of his overall programme, lecturing on Parmenides and Empedokles. Anyway, his next book is on Pythagoras, and I'm bemusedly and eagerly awaiting its arrival. The thing with this author, Peter Kingsley, is that he is both 1) brilliant, and 2) a non-academic advocate. So his books are a profoundly entangled mix of acutely argued scholarship and religious fervor that goes beyond what I call analysis (or, rather, he becomes someone who a scholar of religion would study, rather than a scholar of religion himself). So reading them is challenging, enjoyable, and frustrating all at once, as I try to tease out what is of value to me in his work, and what is of value only to his disciples. This is an interesting problem that one finds more frequently in the work of scholars who identify with a living religious tradition (like reading Cardinal, now Saint, John Henry Newman - both brilliant and a hardcore Catholic, which impacts his analytical work and conclusions), so it's fascinating to experience it with texts from long-gone cultures like the ancient Greeks. If you're interested in seeing how this interplay works out in practice, just look at his website's listing for the book: http://www.peterkingsley.org/Details.cfm?ProdID=60&category=2 The various supporting blurbs are written by a mix of academic classicists, self-help gurus, and alternative-track medical doctors.
4. I'm also very excited by another book that has just come out, though I haven't been able to get a copy of it yet either, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy And Identity In Indian Intellectual History (you can see it on Google books if you're interested). I've taught Hindu Traditions in two different places, and one of my most important teachers, at Syracuse, was an anthropologist who specialized in Indian religions. I've also used Indian materials as comparanda for my own work, and try to keep tabs on interesting new work in the field. This book is striking because one of the major disputes in the study of Hinduism is whether there was ever a unified tradition that can be called "Hinduism" before the period of the British Raj, when British administrators and scholars began using the term to mean all non-Buddhist, non-Jain, non-Sikh, non-Muslim Indians. Some have said this means that there is no underlying unity or meaningful coherence to "Hinduism" before the 18th century, and others say that this is silly, of course there was, there just wasn't a need for a single term before then. I'm actually more of the first camp with the reservation that "meaningful" is a tricky word, and that it's more interesting to see how people on or near the subcontinent interacted with each other and their historical antecedents, including when and how they choose to adopt or give distinguishing corporate names to themselves and others (i.e, when do I start saying that "they" are Xists, and I'm Yist?). This new book is about one of the major pre-colonial attempts to formulate a sense of Hindu-ness, by Indian philosophers, and the previews online make it look very interesting. So I've got two books to which I'm really looking forward to reading.
5. Belated acknowledgment: Happy Birthday to my friends Livia (Monday) and Romulus* (Wednesday)!
* Romulus' name may have to change, as I need to check something but don't have the necessary information to hand at the moment.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Nature and movies
2010.10.03
Days Remaining: 239
1. This evening I watched the Black Stallion and Black Stallion Returns films on Netflix. I've been intending to view them for a while, as I had fond memories of both from my childhood, but they only recently became available for streaming, and I figured this would be a lovely way of spending the evening. The two films have different directors, though Francis Ford Coppola executive produced both, and they had the same actors (even the same horse as playing the Black, though there were apparently supplemental scenes with another horse in the second film). I enjoyed both of them, and they are largely as I recalled, plot-wise, but the difference in directors was nothing short of astonishing. Carroll Ballard directed the original film (he also directed Fly Away Home and, most recently, Duma) and it was far and away the superior of the two. First off, there is almost no musical soundtrack throughout, and when you do hear music, it is all the more compelling for its otherwise absence, as well as the way in which the classical music is allowed to integrate into natural sounds at both the beginning and end of its appearance (one crescendo actually blurs with waves crashing, for instance). Second, the film has very little speech throughout, and allows ambient sounds to filter through. When the protagonist and the horse are stranded on an island, you can hear the loneliness, and when the horse is spooked by a thunderstorm later, you can feel exactly why.
2. The reason I mention this is that I have been having a very interesting email exchange with one of the students in my Native American Religions class. I had them read Leslie Marmon Silko's short story "Yellow Woman," which is a retelling of a traditional Laguna Pueblo (southwestern Native American) story about a woman, Yellow Woman, who is abducted from a river bank by a spirit being and taken to his home on a mountain top. In the modern short story an unnamed narrator meets a strange man by a riverside and goes with him to his house up on a mountain. The narrator is never certain if the man is human or a mountain spirit, and cannot tell if she is role-playing a story she once heard, using the story as an excuse to do something she would otherwise not do, or if she is living out the story literally. One of the things we talk about is the problem of the man's nature and why Silko would retell a traditional story (commonly, but problematically, called a "myth" by most academics) in such a way as to leave the narrator and audience never quite sure what is going on. It's a very skillfully executed story, one of my personal favorites, and the students were left unsure what to make of it (which, I believe, is Silko's intention). I offered one internal detail that leads me to think that the man may be a spirit (though in the end, it's only one detail and not decisive). So my student wrote to me after class and said that she had other reasons to think he was a spirit, and laid them out. I responded with counterpoints to her arguments, and asked for her further reflections on what it would mean for the story if the man was a spirit: how would she read it differently than if he were just a man?
3. Her response was especially intriguing. If he were a spirit, she said, then it would be more straightforwardly fiction, and become comparable to fantasy literature and films. She offered, as a follow-up, that the entire story felt like a dream recounted, and said this was due to the occasional extremely lucid detail about the physical environment offered throughout (very vivid visual description, or close attention paid to some minor element of the setting). This, to her, felt like details in dreams, rather than in waking conscious apprehension of the everyday world. I had not expected this at all: my general understanding of this element of Silko's style is actually the opposite of the dream interpretation: I think these details are interwoven to ground the stories in physicality and render them, in some way, believably concrete. They also, I think, highlight the general deadening of our senses in industrial culture, where we are both subjected to constant overwhelming data streams demanding our attention and asked to handle them in a very quick fashion. Specific hard details that arise in our consciousness in punctuated fashion or over time often strike us a incongruous or even unsettling, but they are more what our systems evolved to handle.
4. This is where the Black Stallion cinematography and soundtrack come back in. The director chose to tell a story, one based on a book, in such a way that the natural world (and the horse within it) spoke much more directly and meaningfully than as background. They were brought into focus throughout as crucial elements to the viewer's perception of what is going on in the story; not scenery but characters in their own right. It served to integrate the boy and the horse into the world so that they only way to understand them was to see where they were and to see and hear what they were seeing and hearing. Ballard used to make documentaries, and it shows. The sequel, directed by someone else (can't remember right now and don't care enough to look it up) is a much more typical movie with intrusive soundtrack, animate character-focused plot and background for the sake of getting the action going. I preferred the first film tremendously, though I enjoyed the second. If you get a chance, I recommend both, but especially the first.
Days Remaining: 239
1. This evening I watched the Black Stallion and Black Stallion Returns films on Netflix. I've been intending to view them for a while, as I had fond memories of both from my childhood, but they only recently became available for streaming, and I figured this would be a lovely way of spending the evening. The two films have different directors, though Francis Ford Coppola executive produced both, and they had the same actors (even the same horse as playing the Black, though there were apparently supplemental scenes with another horse in the second film). I enjoyed both of them, and they are largely as I recalled, plot-wise, but the difference in directors was nothing short of astonishing. Carroll Ballard directed the original film (he also directed Fly Away Home and, most recently, Duma) and it was far and away the superior of the two. First off, there is almost no musical soundtrack throughout, and when you do hear music, it is all the more compelling for its otherwise absence, as well as the way in which the classical music is allowed to integrate into natural sounds at both the beginning and end of its appearance (one crescendo actually blurs with waves crashing, for instance). Second, the film has very little speech throughout, and allows ambient sounds to filter through. When the protagonist and the horse are stranded on an island, you can hear the loneliness, and when the horse is spooked by a thunderstorm later, you can feel exactly why.
2. The reason I mention this is that I have been having a very interesting email exchange with one of the students in my Native American Religions class. I had them read Leslie Marmon Silko's short story "Yellow Woman," which is a retelling of a traditional Laguna Pueblo (southwestern Native American) story about a woman, Yellow Woman, who is abducted from a river bank by a spirit being and taken to his home on a mountain top. In the modern short story an unnamed narrator meets a strange man by a riverside and goes with him to his house up on a mountain. The narrator is never certain if the man is human or a mountain spirit, and cannot tell if she is role-playing a story she once heard, using the story as an excuse to do something she would otherwise not do, or if she is living out the story literally. One of the things we talk about is the problem of the man's nature and why Silko would retell a traditional story (commonly, but problematically, called a "myth" by most academics) in such a way as to leave the narrator and audience never quite sure what is going on. It's a very skillfully executed story, one of my personal favorites, and the students were left unsure what to make of it (which, I believe, is Silko's intention). I offered one internal detail that leads me to think that the man may be a spirit (though in the end, it's only one detail and not decisive). So my student wrote to me after class and said that she had other reasons to think he was a spirit, and laid them out. I responded with counterpoints to her arguments, and asked for her further reflections on what it would mean for the story if the man was a spirit: how would she read it differently than if he were just a man?
3. Her response was especially intriguing. If he were a spirit, she said, then it would be more straightforwardly fiction, and become comparable to fantasy literature and films. She offered, as a follow-up, that the entire story felt like a dream recounted, and said this was due to the occasional extremely lucid detail about the physical environment offered throughout (very vivid visual description, or close attention paid to some minor element of the setting). This, to her, felt like details in dreams, rather than in waking conscious apprehension of the everyday world. I had not expected this at all: my general understanding of this element of Silko's style is actually the opposite of the dream interpretation: I think these details are interwoven to ground the stories in physicality and render them, in some way, believably concrete. They also, I think, highlight the general deadening of our senses in industrial culture, where we are both subjected to constant overwhelming data streams demanding our attention and asked to handle them in a very quick fashion. Specific hard details that arise in our consciousness in punctuated fashion or over time often strike us a incongruous or even unsettling, but they are more what our systems evolved to handle.
4. This is where the Black Stallion cinematography and soundtrack come back in. The director chose to tell a story, one based on a book, in such a way that the natural world (and the horse within it) spoke much more directly and meaningfully than as background. They were brought into focus throughout as crucial elements to the viewer's perception of what is going on in the story; not scenery but characters in their own right. It served to integrate the boy and the horse into the world so that they only way to understand them was to see where they were and to see and hear what they were seeing and hearing. Ballard used to make documentaries, and it shows. The sequel, directed by someone else (can't remember right now and don't care enough to look it up) is a much more typical movie with intrusive soundtrack, animate character-focused plot and background for the sake of getting the action going. I preferred the first film tremendously, though I enjoyed the second. If you get a chance, I recommend both, but especially the first.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Benu Birds and Pouring Rain
2010.10.01
Days Remaining: 241
1. It's been 10 days since my last post, a lacuna far greater than I would have intended if I had planned it, instead of making a series of incremental decisions both active and passive resulting in posting nothing new. Some of it, I suppose, has been particular days that were chock-full of work. Some of it was feeling less than great due to the lingering effects of whatever respiratory infection I had last week (I'm still coughing wetly periodically). Some of it has been laziness. But most of it has been based substantially upon mood in its basest form: I've been out of sorts and sad off and on for days now.
2. I've commented, in direct conversation, to many of you that the most emotionally difficult part of my divorce has been leaving behind my dog, Herman. I sometimes wonder if missing Herman is somehow emblematic of, or encapsulates, the rest of the emotional turmoil that understandably attends a divorce. Maybe if I had been able to get custody of him I would have been sad about something else. My apartment is far too small for a 65 pound German Shepherd/Husky mix, and it would have been a major source of complications in making plans if I had him. But I really do find myself missing him tremendously. This was the case even when I was staying with my parents this summer, so I don't think it's just a specific focus of general loneliness. My ex-wife sent me a message and photo of Herman on Monday this week; she's begun giving him half a can of wet food as part of his dinner each night (he loves wet food, but we couldn't afford it as anything more than an occasional treat). I was kind of jealous, because I had suggested, last year, that maybe we should do this, but we were constrained by money at the time, and now she can do it (the cats eat wet food each meal because even with three cats, it's vastly less expensive than feeding a full grown dog). Apparently for the rest of that first night Herman would go back to his bowl repeatedly on the off chance that there was any more wet food that showed up while he was in another room.
3. I formally filed for divorce on Wednesday, finally. My money situation is such that I don't have a lot of spending cash on hand, and so I've been very careful to not make more trips to Providence than necessary. After my first, thwarted, attempt to file for divorce on 15 September (stopped cold by the fact that I didn't bring my Marriage Certificate with me to the Family Court - because when I called twice to ask what documentation I needed to bring, both times the persons with whom I spoke neglected to mention the Marriage Certificate), I had to a) find my Marriage Certificate buried in packed boxes and b) do another 120 mile round trip to file. I had a therapy appointment this past Wednesday morning and so that was when the filing would have to happen.
4. Though I was successful this time around, the process is almost comical in ways that it isn't easy. I was given an Instruction Sheet along with the forms and told to follow instructions closely, because there are parts of the forms that are supposed to only be filled in by the court personnel. So, okay. The forms were 14 pages long, and the Instruction Sheet's instructions stopped at Page 7. So I filled out everything I was told to do through Page 7, then went back up to the desk. Then I was informed that I needed to fill out Pages 8-14, and that I had left substantial portions of Pages 1-7 blank. When I pointed out that I had only filled out what the Instructions told me to fill out, the clerk was very unhappy with me. I cannot be the first person to have noted the Instruction Sheet's incompleteness, but in the clerk's eyes I was clearly at fault for having an Instruction Sheet that didn't work. So back I went to fill in the rest, including all of the places where the clerk marked Xs on Pages 1-7 to show what I had missed. Then, after doing this, I went back to the desk, and discovered I was still missing some things, including boxes she hadn't marked with an X (though, by this time, she was becoming generally nicer for some reason - maybe because she realized that I was there to file for divorce, something that is probably (not inevitably) emotionally difficult.
5. Then, when that was completed, she took my check for $120, my Marriage Certificate (they want the original for this process), and informed me that this "won't be filed today." She said I should call them on Friday to see if it was done yet, but no promises. And, of course, today I am not free to drive to and from Providence (at least 2.5 hours of traveling, parking, etc.), so I'll have to go back on Monday, if the forms are, in fact, filed by that time. Why do I need to go back? Because they won't mail them to the Sheriff's office to be served to my (not quite yet) ex-wife. I offered to give them the stamped envelopes etc, but they "don't do that." So I have to go back to pick up the forms and put them in a mailbox.
6. It took 10 minutes and $30 to get the marriage certificate. According to Delaware state law, you can actually just declare yourself married if you have the certificate. You don't even need an officiant. But if you want to get divorced, oh, the state will not make it simple (I doubt that they could ever make it easy). Granted, this process is complicated by my distance from Providence, but on general principle they should at the minimum make the correct information available and be able to provide a realistic timeline for the processing of the suit.
7. Anyway, I'm now much closer, in legal terms, to the formal dissolution of my marriage. I have never yet had a second thought about the correctness of my decision to leave. But I do go through periods of missing my ex-wife, and regretting that things have come to this. As I walked out of the courthouse on Wednesday afternoon, having just turned over the forms, my Marriage Certificate, and the processing fee (i.e., everything done in order and set to go), I said, out loud, "Goodbye, wife." I don't know if that was some sort of self-inflected melodrama or something else. But the sense of finality was really...immediate. I had done it, and this is where I am, now, formally and officially.
8. Classes are going well; in fact in some ways they're excellent, if exhausting (the lingering respiratory symptoms make lecturing for 5 straight hours difficult). I was asked to do two dorm talks this coming month on Halloween and ghosts. I did this last year, and they were apparently very popular. The second talk this time is probably going to be on Halloween itself, which is kind of neat. I've also been very encouraged by the slowly increasing number of students who have been coming to office hours or sending me emails wanting to discuss further things we talk about in class. It's not all of my students, but I really enjoy knowing that the classes motivate some of them to want more and to think further on their own.
9. There are a lot of other things I've been thinking about over the past week and a half, but I need to get to campus to grade essays, do office work, and then participate tonight in the dreaded Houndalympics (goes from 7pm-3am...sigh). I will work harder to not let the long gap between posts occur again.
10. Oh, and a shout out to my niece, Iunia, for being appointed Student of the Week at her kindergarten class, and to my nephew, Euander, for scoring a goal in a soccer game last weekend. I'm very proud of you both!
Days Remaining: 241
1. It's been 10 days since my last post, a lacuna far greater than I would have intended if I had planned it, instead of making a series of incremental decisions both active and passive resulting in posting nothing new. Some of it, I suppose, has been particular days that were chock-full of work. Some of it was feeling less than great due to the lingering effects of whatever respiratory infection I had last week (I'm still coughing wetly periodically). Some of it has been laziness. But most of it has been based substantially upon mood in its basest form: I've been out of sorts and sad off and on for days now.
2. I've commented, in direct conversation, to many of you that the most emotionally difficult part of my divorce has been leaving behind my dog, Herman. I sometimes wonder if missing Herman is somehow emblematic of, or encapsulates, the rest of the emotional turmoil that understandably attends a divorce. Maybe if I had been able to get custody of him I would have been sad about something else. My apartment is far too small for a 65 pound German Shepherd/Husky mix, and it would have been a major source of complications in making plans if I had him. But I really do find myself missing him tremendously. This was the case even when I was staying with my parents this summer, so I don't think it's just a specific focus of general loneliness. My ex-wife sent me a message and photo of Herman on Monday this week; she's begun giving him half a can of wet food as part of his dinner each night (he loves wet food, but we couldn't afford it as anything more than an occasional treat). I was kind of jealous, because I had suggested, last year, that maybe we should do this, but we were constrained by money at the time, and now she can do it (the cats eat wet food each meal because even with three cats, it's vastly less expensive than feeding a full grown dog). Apparently for the rest of that first night Herman would go back to his bowl repeatedly on the off chance that there was any more wet food that showed up while he was in another room.
3. I formally filed for divorce on Wednesday, finally. My money situation is such that I don't have a lot of spending cash on hand, and so I've been very careful to not make more trips to Providence than necessary. After my first, thwarted, attempt to file for divorce on 15 September (stopped cold by the fact that I didn't bring my Marriage Certificate with me to the Family Court - because when I called twice to ask what documentation I needed to bring, both times the persons with whom I spoke neglected to mention the Marriage Certificate), I had to a) find my Marriage Certificate buried in packed boxes and b) do another 120 mile round trip to file. I had a therapy appointment this past Wednesday morning and so that was when the filing would have to happen.
4. Though I was successful this time around, the process is almost comical in ways that it isn't easy. I was given an Instruction Sheet along with the forms and told to follow instructions closely, because there are parts of the forms that are supposed to only be filled in by the court personnel. So, okay. The forms were 14 pages long, and the Instruction Sheet's instructions stopped at Page 7. So I filled out everything I was told to do through Page 7, then went back up to the desk. Then I was informed that I needed to fill out Pages 8-14, and that I had left substantial portions of Pages 1-7 blank. When I pointed out that I had only filled out what the Instructions told me to fill out, the clerk was very unhappy with me. I cannot be the first person to have noted the Instruction Sheet's incompleteness, but in the clerk's eyes I was clearly at fault for having an Instruction Sheet that didn't work. So back I went to fill in the rest, including all of the places where the clerk marked Xs on Pages 1-7 to show what I had missed. Then, after doing this, I went back to the desk, and discovered I was still missing some things, including boxes she hadn't marked with an X (though, by this time, she was becoming generally nicer for some reason - maybe because she realized that I was there to file for divorce, something that is probably (not inevitably) emotionally difficult.
5. Then, when that was completed, she took my check for $120, my Marriage Certificate (they want the original for this process), and informed me that this "won't be filed today." She said I should call them on Friday to see if it was done yet, but no promises. And, of course, today I am not free to drive to and from Providence (at least 2.5 hours of traveling, parking, etc.), so I'll have to go back on Monday, if the forms are, in fact, filed by that time. Why do I need to go back? Because they won't mail them to the Sheriff's office to be served to my (not quite yet) ex-wife. I offered to give them the stamped envelopes etc, but they "don't do that." So I have to go back to pick up the forms and put them in a mailbox.
6. It took 10 minutes and $30 to get the marriage certificate. According to Delaware state law, you can actually just declare yourself married if you have the certificate. You don't even need an officiant. But if you want to get divorced, oh, the state will not make it simple (I doubt that they could ever make it easy). Granted, this process is complicated by my distance from Providence, but on general principle they should at the minimum make the correct information available and be able to provide a realistic timeline for the processing of the suit.
7. Anyway, I'm now much closer, in legal terms, to the formal dissolution of my marriage. I have never yet had a second thought about the correctness of my decision to leave. But I do go through periods of missing my ex-wife, and regretting that things have come to this. As I walked out of the courthouse on Wednesday afternoon, having just turned over the forms, my Marriage Certificate, and the processing fee (i.e., everything done in order and set to go), I said, out loud, "Goodbye, wife." I don't know if that was some sort of self-inflected melodrama or something else. But the sense of finality was really...immediate. I had done it, and this is where I am, now, formally and officially.
8. Classes are going well; in fact in some ways they're excellent, if exhausting (the lingering respiratory symptoms make lecturing for 5 straight hours difficult). I was asked to do two dorm talks this coming month on Halloween and ghosts. I did this last year, and they were apparently very popular. The second talk this time is probably going to be on Halloween itself, which is kind of neat. I've also been very encouraged by the slowly increasing number of students who have been coming to office hours or sending me emails wanting to discuss further things we talk about in class. It's not all of my students, but I really enjoy knowing that the classes motivate some of them to want more and to think further on their own.
9. There are a lot of other things I've been thinking about over the past week and a half, but I need to get to campus to grade essays, do office work, and then participate tonight in the dreaded Houndalympics (goes from 7pm-3am...sigh). I will work harder to not let the long gap between posts occur again.
10. Oh, and a shout out to my niece, Iunia, for being appointed Student of the Week at her kindergarten class, and to my nephew, Euander, for scoring a goal in a soccer game last weekend. I'm very proud of you both!
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