EAR EGG NUTS

“Modern literature, she announced, must admit its limits. Nothing can ever really be described. Words, like paint, are not a mirror.”

“Words make reality seem as if it is composed of discrete parts- like adjectives, nouns, and verbs- when in actual experience, all these different parts run together.”

-Lerer, “Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language”

I know we are supposed to choose one quote from a primary reading as well as one from a secondary reading. However, I can’t find one of the secondary readings, and the only other secondary reading deals with Stein’s work. I do not know how to read Stein’s work. I cannot even begin to fathom what it is saying. I really enjoyed the Handy Guide by Dean Young, but I am unsure of how to relate it back to the secondary reading. So I am just going to talk about two of the quotes I picked from the secondary reading. The first discusses the limits of language, as does the second. The first states that nothing can be described and the second kind of explains why. The second quote is more interesting to me. In our everyday lives, when we are talking or thinking, many processes are involved. This means that no matter how thorough our language is, we cannot really describe everything. We have so many different emotions that are involved in thoughts and speech, as well as writing. There are some experiences, that when put down on paper, fall short of the real thing. If you took a sentence like ‘my boyfriend broke up with me’, you have to look at the sentence as a whole. You can’t just look at the nouns and verbs, as stated in the second quote. It is what the sentence is saying when it is all put together that matters. Besides that point, there could be a high level emotion having to do with that sentence that cannot be described with words. The situation in which an activity occurred may also be impossible to describe in words, let alone one sentence. The ‘background’ of that sentence or fact , so to speak, as well as the emotions related to that background, are impossible to put into words so accurately that every reader would feel the same way as other readers or the writer. My old calculus teacher hated words. He would get so riled up when we talked about language at all. He would just yell, ‘I don’t even understand them. Sentences are made up of words, which are just a jumble of letters thrown together, which are just random symbols. And don’t even get me started on how we can even listen to those random symbols and draw ideas and thoughts from them!” I mean, the idea really is mind-blowing. The fact is, those random symbols will never be able to describe true emotions and true thoughts of the writer.

Happiness?

"The package of reactions that constitutes crying and sobbing is ready and active at birth; what we cry for, across a lifetime, changes with our experience."

-Demasio, from Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

"On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love. 

And in the evening the sun is just rising.

Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them of their pleasure.

In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy..."

-Antimatter by Russell Edson

Alright so I'm terrible at picking apart and understanding poetry, but I really enjoyed Edson's poem. All my opinions on what he is trying to say may be completely wrong, but yours may be too. So here we go. So in the beginning, Edson states that behind our mirror there is a different world, that is opposite of our own. The insane go sane, which is a good thing I would think. 'Bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love', weird, but cool. It could mean people who have died rise again. But does he truly mean they rise? Or does he mean that they begin their life anew. I guess that depends on your understanding of what he means by the first slime of love. The word recede would mean to go back into or backwards, which leads me to think Edson is actually talking about their moment of conception. On the other hand, he could just be referring to life itself. Next, he discusses that the sun rises in the evening, which is obviously opposite of our world. But it seems like he is referring to evening as a new beginning, not an end as we think of it. The next line is probably the most confusing to me. I mean, in the whole poem he is discussing the reversal of time and the effects of time (aka people who have gone insane revert back to sanity, those who have died come back to life or possibly even to conception, and the days seem to be going backwards). So it would follow that people would grow younger as opposed to older. Lovers lose each other because they revert back to childhood. This can sometimes be the opposite of our lives in the way that most people wish they could go back to childhood and not have to face an adult world. But in this poem, people do not want to go 'back' (?) to childhood because it means losing their adulthood. I believe in his last line, Edson is saying that in this strange other world, people are sad by the passing of life, just like in our world. However, before reading his poem I would have considered going back to childhood and coming back to life as joyful things. He gives us the other side of this idea. He writes his poem in a way that makes me feel sad for this other world, which is most likely the point. I mean, people are never really happy with what they have. They always want more or less, depending on the situation. Less homework, more ice cream; that kind of thing. This poem kind of makes me think of the whole 'the grass is greener on the other side' saying. No, it really isn't, or at least not according to Edson. Our sorrows could be nothing (and in most cases are nothing) compared to how large they could be. Like I said, I really have no clue if this is what Edson is trying to say at all. It just seems like he is saying nothing is perfect. Happiness is truly relative. But usually, most people wish their lives were different. Edson wants to to quit that and just be all kinds of happy with your current life. So do it. It could be worse.

Demasio discusses that our emotional reactions are based upon our experiences in life. I believe this to be fully true, and it definitely relates to Edson's poem, or at least, my perception of it. People who have had bad experiences could be happier in certain situations (even those that may not be the best situations to most) than those who have not due to their bad past. However, their bad experiences could also make them bitter towards any good experiences that come their way. On the other hand, people who have experienced extreme happiness may not be happy in situations that most find quite pleasing. But what really is happiness? I know Demasio is discussing all emotions (and in this specific quote, he talks about crying which is not always related to happiness), but for the sake of Edson's poem, I'll only be talking about happiness. I believe that happiness is different to everyone. Sadness, however, is a more universal emotion (but obviously not completely universal). For instance, I have a good friend that is completely content and happy to sit in his room all day and not speak to a single person. I, however, would hate that. I am happy talking with others and hate being cooped up in my room. We have different ideas of happiness. I think this definitely has something to do with our past experiences, as well as our personality differences (and personalities are somewhat based on environment- aka our experiences). We would both be sad if say our parents died or something though. Most people would. I'm not sure if my examples are making sense, but all in all, happiness depends on how you view the world and how much you wish you had a different kind of life. 

Empathy

"But just now, she could think of only Captain Wentworth. She could not understand his present feelings, whether he were really suffering much from disappointment or not; and till that point were settled, she could not be quite herself."

Jane Austen's Persuasion

"Empathy, a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, can be provoked by witnessing another's emotional state, by hearing about another's condition or context, empathy is thought to be a precursor to its semantic close relative, sympathy."

Suzanne Keen's A Theory of Narrative Empathy

This may be kind of a cluster of thoughts on my part, but here we go. So Anne just finished having quite an awkward conversation with Captain Wentworth in the quote above, in which she couldn't quite understand what he was feeling, but drew that he was quite distressed and experiencing suffering over his situation with Louisa and seeing Anne again. She was feeling an accurate amount of empathy toward Captain Wentworth according to his actions during their conversation. However, she could not show any empathy toward Mr. Elliot during their conversation if any was needed because she was too concerned with Captain Wentworth. Therefore, the following question came across my mind: how much attention does someone have to pay to another person to be able to show empathy? Obviously, Anne was not going to show empathy toward Mr. Elliot because she wasn't even listening to what he said. But in other situations, how much attention must be paid to get that gut wrenching feeling when someone else is crying? This is especially a good question in reference to literature. How much attention must be paid to the story and sentence structure to invoke empathy? For instance, because I have paid a great amount of attention to Persuasion, when reading the quote above, I got extremely nervous. If Anne is not paying the correct amount of attention to Mr. Elliot, what will his reaction be?  I fully support Anne's infatuation with Captain Wentworth. However, the author does not give us insight to his thoughts, so we do not know if he feels the same about Anne. I was concerned that Anne was on track to lose Mr. Elliot's love for someone that did not love her back. This feeling of nervousness was due to the fact that I became involved with each of the characters throughout the story. If I had not, would I have picked up on this feeling? I am not exactly mirroring Anne's feelings, in the sense that I can still be myself, but I am also concerned about how Captain Wentworth is feeling, even if those feelings are for different reason than Anne's. Anne is more concerned that Wentworth is suffering over the loss of his courtship with Louisa. I am concerned about the same, but I also worry that Wentworth's suffering is due to being in the presence of Anne as well. So bringing it back to the original question, how much must a reader pay attention to the story line, the sentence structure, or both to experience empathy for the characters? If I had not read enough to develop a connection with the readers, would I still have felt empathy? Also, does a reader's personal experience play a part in feeling empathy with a character? Most of these questions are discussed in Keen's work, but there are obviously no concise answers as of yet.