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.

Paper Post

Hey guys!
I know I am crazy late on putting this up, but I wanted to wait until I got a chance to meet with our professor before posting my currently atrocious work.

1. Title:

The Relationship of Attention and Perception as Described in Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Proctor and Johnson’s Attention: Theory and Practice

2. Introductory Paragraph:  
Many literary works demonstrate the relationship between attention and perception. In the 18^th century, attention was defined in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language as, “The act of attending or heeding; the act of bending the mind upon anything”. The current day definition by Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary reads: “The act or state of applying the mind to something”. Johnson described perception as, “The power of perceiving; knowledge; consciousness; Perception is that act of the mind, or rather a paffion or impreffion, whereby the mind becomes conscious of anything”. Merriam-Webster’s definition is as follows: “The result of perceiving: observation or a mental image”.  Overall, perception is the result of attention. To gain a consciousness or knowledge of something, you must first attend to it. As demonstrated by Jonathon Swift in Gulliver’s Travels as well as Proctor and Johnson’s Attention: Theory and Practice, attention is the basis for perception, and more attention is paid to those things that more greatly affect us. 

3. First body paragraph sentence:
Jonathan Swift writes a great deal about attention and perception in Gulliver’s Travels. In Chapter Two, Swift describes the way of life of the Laputian citizens. One specific quote that touches on attention and perception is as follows, “It seems the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing”.   
(Longer than a sentence, I know. But I wanted to give a sense of where I was going instead of just leaving just the first sentence)

4. Second body paragraph sentence:
These quotes not only correlate the attention and perception of the Laputians, it also compares the narrator’s attention to his perception.

5. Third body paragraph sentence:
Swift continues to describe the Laputians throughout the chapter and gives many more examples of attention and perception, such as, “Imagination, fancy, and invention, they are wholly strangers to, nor have any words in their language, by which those ideas can be expressed; the whole compass of their thoughts and mind being shut up within the two forementioned sciences”. This quote also proves that how much attention is paid to something relates how everything else in the world is perceived.  
(Again, more than a sentence, yes.)

6. Fourth body paragraph sentence:
Another reading that discusses attention and perception is Proctor and Johnson’s Attention: Theory and Practice. One quote that directly relates to attention and perception is that of Proctor and Johnson quoting Malebranche: “The mind does not pay equal attention to everything it perceives. For it applies itself infinitely more to those things that affect it, that modify it, and that penetrate it, than to those that are present to it but that do not affect it and do not belong to it”.   

7. Terrible Conclusion
If both Swift’s and Proctor and Johnson’s works are taken into consideration, it seems safest to assume that how you perceive things is, indeed, based on the amount of attention paid to them, and while perceptions (in the sense of both actual observations and ideas formed after an observation is made) can be unlimited, attention is very finite and is usually only paid to things that are most relatable to our lives.  
(It definitely needs work. I just somewhat feel like a good body is needed before a good conclusion can be written ;))

Thanks so much to anyone that is still checking blogs this late and wants to give me some feedback.
:)

 

Blooming Thoughts

“Hence proceeds the superior distinctness of pleasurable or painful imagery in our sleep; for we recall the figure and the features of a long lost friend, whom we loved, in our dreams with much more accuracy and vivacity than in our waking thoughts. This circumstance contributes to prove, that our ideas of imagination are reiterations of those motions of our organs of sense, which were excited by external objects; because while we are exposed to the stimuli of present objects, our ideas of absent objects cannot be so distinctly formed.”

-        Darwin, Zoonomia, “On Sleep”

“So the question is why, among all these beautiful things, do flowers so often push themselves forward as primary candidates for our sense of what imagining is.”

-        Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, “Imagining Flowers”

In these two quotes, I believe imagination is described in two different ways: one scientific, one romantic. The first quote explains that we dream about things more accurately than we see them because we are so overloaded with stimuli that we cannot imagine absent things because of so much stimuli. If this includes daydreaming, I definitely agree. If it is only in reference to dreaming while asleep, I personally cannot relate because I don’t vividly remember my dreams; I only remember bits and pieces. The second quote discusses that flowers are the poster child for imagination. I think these quotes are both extremely related. Picture a flower. It has some roots, a stem, some leaves, maybe some thorns, and a pretty little topper. Petals and colors and stuff; all very complex. I won’t go into the inner workings of the flower, because I am tired of hearing about cellular respiration, photosynthesis, the Calvin Cycle, types of cells, etc. in all my classes. But we all know they are gorgeous little complex things. So think about the roots in comparison with imagination. Every thought you have, has roots. Whether these roots are old experiences, new experiences, or just ideas of future experiences, they are the beginning of imagination. Then, we’ll discuss the stem. The stem could be viewed as the building up of an idea or imagination. For example, the formulation of a more detailed plan: the details are the stem. In my mind, the leaves and thorns are similar. The leaves are kind of branching off of an idea. They are side ideas, that you don’t really have time to work on at the moment but are there anyways. They are the good beginnings of a new idea. The thorns are also side ideas, but they are more like bad side ideas. The kind that you immediately squash and think you are silly for having. The flower itself is the finished product of your imagination; the gorgeous bloom of an idea. The flower is full of petals, just like your ideas and imagination is full of layers. When I relate the first quote to the second, it puts this in my mind: you cannot grow a flower if there is too much going on in your life. You have to water a flower, make sure it has enough sunlight, and sometimes talk to it (yes, really. It helps them grow). If you are too busy with school, relationships, or work, you do not have time to do all of those things. It is the same with formulating an idea or using your imagination. Having too much stimulation (aka all of those things that keep you from growing a flower) keeps you from sitting down and forming a complex idea. As we’ve discussed in class, overstimulation seems like it is becoming a problem in society, especially when it comes to attention. So when we are sleeping and dreaming or daydreaming, we are pulled away from all of that overstimulation and are more allowed to formulate ideas and use imagination, as explained by the first quote.  Enough of my word vomit. I want to hear some of yours.

The Magic of Reading...?

“‘Why don’t you get your task, instead of playing with your playthings from morning till night? You are grown too old now to do nothing but play. It is high time you should learn to read and write, for you cannot be a child all your life, child; so go fetch your book and learn your task.’”

-        Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education

“I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people’s thoughts. I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.”

-        Charles Lamb, Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading

 

The quote I chose from Edgeworth’s work describes a specific moment in time when a child comes to distinguish between the words play and task- that ‘play’ can have a more negative and negligent connotation and ‘task’ has a more responsible one. In this specific quote, the child’s task is reading. This is the first quote in Chapter II of Practical Education, which is mainly about teaching children to read and write. Taken out of context however, it raises a completely different question and thought process for me. Since when did reading become a task? Understandably, for those that have difficulty with written language, it may not be the most enjoyable activity available. However, how can it be a task to take yourself away from the real world and drink in the thoughts of others- placing yourself in a completely different world? I believe that fits more with the definition of play than task. I know, for me, the stress of college and schoolwork, as well as social drama or my job, can become overwhelming. One of my biggest forms of ‘play’ is to lose myself in a literary work. This idea coincides with Lamb’s opinion on reading. In the quote from Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading, Lamb discusses how often he loses himself in others’ thoughts in the form of works of literature. He words our shared opinions perfectly when he says “Books think for me”. It is incredibly enjoyable to pull yourself away from all your worries and stress and just enjoy a book. Allowing yourself to have another world built up around yourself and to put yourself in the shoes of the main character, enjoying their problems and dilemmas and letting yours melt away. Lamb’s work is, like the title implies, very detached. He jumps from idea to idea, using numerous different forms of literature to support them. However, his main idea is consistent throughout: reading is enjoyable. He even describes that most books should not be feared- that their obvious wear implies they are enjoyable and good forms of entertainment. He also discusses that those books with less wear are probably less enjoyable, but that there are many books that have been read over and over, proving their worth. Reading some of my classmates blogs, I realized that the topic of EBooks was brought up. The question was raised of what will our children’s books look like? A question I have is possibly even more cynical. Will books even exist in the same sense that they do now? Of course those families that are very focused around reading will instill those ideas in their children, but with video games, movies, music, the internet, and all the other forms of technology, will reading hold the same importance? Will children steal away to their rooms to read books or will they just sit on the couch and play video games to escape the real world? I believe the latter would be a terrible tragedy, although I know others think totally different. I believe novels, poetry, and other forms of literature (yes, even textbooks) all have a large piece of magic. The idea that we can sit down, read a series of words, learn infinite amounts, and enjoy ourselves is absolutely magical. Hopefully, that magic will not wear out in future generations.

How will you remember this title 2 weeks from now?

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

-Proust in Remembrance of Things Past- The Episode of the Madeleine

“After all, we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.”

-Lerer in “Proust: The Method of Memory”

               In the first quote by Proust, he is discussing an instance in which he tasted a tea cake for the first time in a long time and it invoked a strange feeling of happiness. At first he could not place the feeling, until he realized it brought back the memory of spending time with his Aunt Leonie in Combray. The almost romantic language he is using to describe this sensation is very interesting. He is describing that although life can change so much after the formation of a memory, even to the point of not remembering you have the memory, things like smell and taste can bring the memory back to light even though those senses are somewhat ‘fragile’. His comparison of those seemingly meaningless but actually quite important senses to souls is interesting because he gives those senses a ‘body’ so to speak. He romanticizes them very much.

               The second quote is by Lerer, who actually writes about Proust’s story and writing style. Lerer describes how Proust’s novel is fully focused around intuition. In fact, he describes Proust’s episode of the madeleine cake as more of an explanation of how memory and senses were connected inside his brain, which was a very advanced thought for Proust’s time. Later Lerer describes that now scientists know that the senses of smell and taste are directly connected to the hippocampus, which is where our memories are ‘stored’. Specifically, though, Lerer’s quote discusses how our memories actually change each time we remember them or think of them, which also relates to Proust. Proust believed that our memories were not real, and were instead imaginations of the brain. As Lerer writes about Proust’s madeleine, “Proust realized that the moment we finish eating the cookie, leaving behind a collection of crumbs on a porcelain plate, we begin warping the memory of the cookie to fit our own personal narrative”. Lerer seems to be fascinated by Proust’s extremely advanced ideas that memories are not perfect pictures of events. Lerer uses a scientific experiment known as the Nader experiment, in which rats are shocked when a certain song plays, to support this idea. In the experiment, the rats obviously became terrified when hearing the song after being shocked enough times. The scientists injected some of the rats with a drug that stopped formation of memory, so obviously the song meant nothing to the rats, even after they were shocked numerous times in accordance with it. In the experiment, they also injected the rats that had been conditioned according to the song, only this time, the injection occurred when the song began playing. The scientists had believed that after the injection wore off, the memory of the ‘bad song’ would return to the rats. However, this did not happen. By injecting the rats at the same time they were having the memory, they actually erased it. This proved that memory is actually a continuous process. Memories are not, in fact, stored permanently somewhere in the brain. It also showed that every time a memory is remembered, it is actually transformed to become more relatable to your life at that present time. As Lerer states, “The moment you remember the cookie’s taste is the same moment you forgot what it really tasted like”. This is quite interesting to me, especially since I had a very similar experience just yesterday. For dinner, I got ribs and corn on the cob from the cafeteria. When I took that first bite of corn that happened to have some barbeque sauce on it, I immediately began thinking of summer cook outs. That specific taste brought back the memory of those summer evenings to me. Does that mean I had forgotten the taste of corn on the cob and ribs? Or had I just not been remembering that specific taste in any recent time? (Of course, why would I randomly think about the taste of corn on the cob and ribs?)  It is interesting that memories can be changed by ourselves to fit us so convincingly that we don’t even recognize the differences. How can this idea ever be proven? If no one ever knows what a memory first looked like, how can we know it changed? What happens if we remember exactly what happened on a specific day and we have that day on video tape and watch it again years later? Were the memories between the actual event and the moment we watched the tape different from those that actually happened? When we watch the tape is it like a refreshment of the first memory, but since it is the newest version of the memory and we didn’t notice the small memory changes earlier, we don’t realize our previous memories were slightly skewed? Or are memory changes things that are so small that the differences between the memory changes and the original memory can’t be caught on tape? (For example, remembering the sky as a much more vivid shade of blue, and explaining away the more dull shade of blue by the limitations of the video recorder). I understand that our memories are obviously changed by experiences we have had since the formation of the memory, but how long does it take before the memory is changed in our minds? For instance, if I looked at the beginning of this post, will changes about what I wrote or my ideas at the time already have occurred? I can definitely understand and even somewhat notice changes that showed memories in a more positive light. For example, if you had been looking forward to doing something fun like riding a roller coaster, and the first time you actually rode it, it wasn’t as fun as you had hoped. Later, when remembering the event, you claimed ‘it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t too disappointing. It was actually kind of fun’- and you actually remembered the event as more fun than it actually was. This is, in my opinion, kind of an emotional protection. You don’t want to be disappointed by something that you had been looking forward to, so your brain changes your memory to protect you from that disappointment.

               The idea of constantly changing memories is interesting in the sense of novels or works of literature. Do certain writers change the memory of the original idea of their character as they’re writing? Does this affect how the story is written and how the reader understands it? I have been ignorant of the idea of constantly changing memories until this week, so I will have to keep an eye out for this in the future and other ways changing memories affect the flow or writing of a novel.

               I definitely may have rambled a lot during this post, but a week after you read it, your memories will have changed on it anyway, so you may not even remember that fact.