Hello, My name is Ammu

The re-creating, re-telling of the common myth.  That is what this class has taught me to look for in each book I read, story I hear, event I witness.

After being assigned the Magus, one of the main themes communicated was the characters' literal reenactment of these myths.  Not only were we given a novel to interpret on our own, to search for the stories within the story, but also a handful of scenes directly involving classical literature and Greek mythology.  Whether to aid in our search for the myth or merely to confuse us more, it was more than prevalent that the favorite activity of the majority of the characters was dressing up literally as Greek deities during an already-emphasized-as-important scene, often while referencing some important piece of literature.  It was exhausting to read.

And what does one (well, at least this sleepy girl with no weekend plans) do when they are exhausted from reading?  Read some more!  Having had so much assigned reading, it was the perfect surprise to receive a book from a friend in the mail last week.  A book called The God of Small Things. I decided to take the time to read solely for the purpose of enjoyment, and spent the weekend under the spell of this nostalgic tale.  I hope you all can read it at some point in your lives.  It is a beautifully written account of a terrifying time in a child's life- very hard to read at times, very strange, sad, but worth every sentence to reach the end.

One of the main characters is a young, troubled mother called Ammu.

Ammu is not a happy woman.  She is divorced, forced to move back into her mother's house, live with malicious relatives, and take care of her twins who both save her and kill her a little more with each loving look.  She realizes she is aging down a straight, foretold path in which she can see all the way to the end: her death.  During one scene, she inspects her almost thirty-year-old body in the bathroom mirror, touching her stretch marks from the birth of her children, feeling the width of her hips flare beneath her slender waist, tickling the small of her back with the ends of her hair.  She conducts the Toothbrush Test, inserting a toothbrush underneath a breast to see if it stays on its own, to see if gravity has already affected her body.  It falls to the floor.

The novel haunted me all weekend, as most stories do while we are in their midst.  However, last night my mind was in a thousand other places, happily buzzing with the days conversations and going-ons as I stood underneath the light stream of the shower. I let it quickly scald my body before stepping out, and without being conscious of my actions, scanned my body in the mirror.  I let Ammu's eyes, my eyes, look over each limb, each curve, and out of pure curiosity took the Toothbrush Test myself.  I laughed at Ammu in the mirror.

Whoa Katie, we don't need to hear about you sticking a toothbrush underneath your boob.  Sorry for getting personal, as that isn't the point of this blog.  The point is that as I stood there, I realized I was re-creating the myth, re-telling the story of the beautifully unhappy woman and her beautiful twins.  Just like Conchis's staged scene of Apollo and Artemis, his actors dressing up as the Gods, I stood there dressing up as Ammu.

 Dressing up with nothing on.

What I Wanted to Add to Our Conversation...

 

As mentioned in my last blog, the most prominent message the Magus conveyed to me was that of human nature's constant search for answers instead of acceptance of the unknown.  Another important theme came to me during today's discussion, however, which was the theme of sex.

Why is it that Nicholas becomes so emotionally tormented, so deceived, and so astounded at Lily-Julie-Vanessa's betrayal?  It's because she has sex with him.  Well, she also flirts, kisses, and feeds him all sorts of amorous promises, but the convincing factor for Nicholas of her trust is the offering of her body.  Although Nicholas doesn't treat sex as a sacred act himself, womanizing and even visiting brothels for release, he expects the sacredness from his female partners.  As he explains in his own words, "...no girl could pretend to want and to enjoy such things unless she was a prostitute."

The irony of the situation is that Nicholas uses sex in many of the same ways the young Lily uses sex: to trick the partner into believing in the love of the act for selfish benefit.  Where Nicholas uses sex for pleasure, Lily appears to use it for the game in which Nicholas is the experiment.  However, because Lily is female, Nicholas mirrors societies views that if she uses sex for selfish reasons she must be a "prostitute".  Only a morally corrupt woman could seduce a man outside the boundaries of love, whether it be for a moral test or pleasure.  "Why did she let me make love to her?" he incredulously asks her mother, astounded at how she could use her body against him.  She simply responds, "I understand it was her wish."

For this, I believe the novel is extremely contemporary for its time.  The entire group of the "God Game" treats sex casually, as one sharing their body with another, and for this can use it easily to trick Nicholas.  We find this attitude towards sex more often than not nowadays, used more as a natural connection (and yes, in many cases for selfish reasons) with less sacred or emotional attachment.  Although women still carry the stigma of being "loose" in comparison to men when developing this attitude, the stigma has softened from the time of the novel's publishing in 1965.

Sex is such an important component to human life, it is no wonder that throughout human history the act has been tied with the sacred.  I appreciate Fowles' challenge of it, especially in his decade, for there is no more interesting a theme to ponder than that of sex.

The Magus

 One man's search for answers.  This is what almost seven hundred pages of the Godgame comes to. Answers.

Isn't that what mankind does?  We constantly need solutions to continue in life, to become satisfied and reach peace with a topic before we can move on to the next.  The answer to one's happiness.  The answer to a relationship.  Even the answer to the future.  How many times this year has a conversation come down to the dreaded What are your plans after college? conversation piece?

Not only are we constantly searching for answers, but also providing answers.  More than this, we feel obligated to provide answers.  Society requires that you have a plan or solution to your future in order to achieve a state of contentment.  Everybody knows that.

So it is not a surprise that we find Nicholas frustrated and tortured throughout these six-hundred-some pages because he is given not one reliable answer.  He is given false truths, forcing him to continue to question everything he has been told and to think one step ahead.  Towards the end of the novel, he confronts the mother of the twins, Lily, about the "game" they have played of him.

"Am I ever going to be told what you really think you're doing?"

"You have been told."

"Lie upon lie."

"Perhaps that's our way of telling the truth."

By feeding him constant stories, the makers of this game show Nicholas a truth (although through cruel and harsh methods) that he might not have discovered otherwise: always questioning allows one to truly think, and therefore truly live.  To be left without a solution, to be left with the unknown, is an uncomfortable and often scary situation.  Our minds are muddled, the human nature of inquiry pushing to overcome the obstacle by resolving the problem.  However, is it a problem?  Is it a negative thing to be satisfied with pondering instead of an answer?  When we are thinking is when we are expressing our individualism and true self, challenging our surroundings and expectations of others.

"'An answer is always a form of death.'" Lily quoted Conchis.

"I think questions are a form of life."

That they are.  Maybe not all answers are a death- when one can find solace in a solution it is a beautiful occurrence.  What I will remember personally, though, is witnessing an individual step in the direction of the unknown and move forward into life without that solace.  To forever question and find acceptance in life's mysteries- that, to me, is even more beautiful.

It Startled Me to Read...

It startled me to read Eliade's paragraph on Nazism, on "...how such a pessimistic vision of the end of history could ever have fired even a portion of the German people."

This startled me because that was my exact thought since learning about the holocaust.  How could one man convince almost the entirety of Germany to follow him down such a horrendous path?  How is it possible that so many people became so devoted to the Aryan race and such an outrageously horrible cause?  It wasn't until last November, while in Berlin's German History museum, that I began to see how.

Three of my friend's and I decided to take the weekend away from our studies in Spain to gallivant around in the snowfall of the German Christmas Markets. We spent long nights strolling through the smells of bratwurst and gluhwein, ice skating underneath warm colored lights, and drinking too much beer with new friends in our hostel.  But don't get the wrong impression- during the day we put our historian faces on and took a walking tour of the city (after which we nearly lost all of our fingers and toes to frostbite), and ended the day by ducking into the museums to warm up.  We politely started on the top floor of the History museum, pretending to be fascinated by the old roman artifacts and battles, but consciously working our way quickly down into the 1930s where the answer to Eliade's question lay.

I walked through the years of World War II.  Entering from the more-or-less innocent stages of the beginning, of Hitler's rise to power, the slow scapegoating of the Jewish people, one notices the troubles begin to arise but doesn't think much of it. "It's just propaganda," I thought as I looked at a red, firey, Nazi character rise above the ashes of a city on a poster, "There's always another side to politics, someone will create more powerful propaganda to balance its evil."  But there wasn't.  It was all of these miniscule steps that Nazism took forward, so little that one doesn't give too much worry, until the steps had built and built on top of one another to wobble treacherously, reaching closer and closer that horrible ledge of "ragnarök" (the last battle, or the end of the world, as Eliade translates it), to form this black staircase of complete brainwashing.  There was no other word I could think of to describe it.

And then I was there.  I was standing in the museum room of the Holocaust, of ragnarök, watching citizen after perish before my eyes in the concentration camps.  I whipped my head back around, tears filling my eyes- how did this happen so quickly?  I had literally been standing amongst those first "harmless" years of propaganda just and hour or two before.  How did one man eventually convince the commoner to "give up your old Judaeo-Christian stories, and re-kindle, in the depths of your souls, the beliefs of your ancestors the Germans; then prepare yourself for the last grand battle between our gods and the demonic forces."

He reanimated Germanic mythology, and he did so through complete brainwashing.  I think Eliade's use of the term "pessimistic" is a little too light here, don't you?

This term "brainwashing" was also mentioned in class the other day in relation to the Bible.  Hold up, hold up, I am not trying to relate the Holocaust to the Bible, but merely searching for other places in our world "brainwashing" might exist.  We talked of how the difference between religion and the Bible is thought of by many as the difference between the spirit and authority, of belief and brainwashing.  I would have to say I agree.  Not that I have ever read the Bible (who am I to talk?!), but I have personally seen the difference between an individual who believes in Christianity and an individual who follows the Bible.

It was a day earlier this Spring, in a class where we were having the good ol' gay marriage argument . No one would speak up, so I finally did.  "My brother is gay." I didn't say anything else.

NOW no one would speak up. I tried not to laugh as, when we were asked to go around the circle and each give our individual opinion, everyone answered in favor of gay rights. That is until we reached the end of the circle.  A blonde with a light voice answered a sweet little, "no."

When asked why, she answered simply, "It is clearly written in the bible that man should be with woman. And that's how it should stay."

Killer argument, I thought sarcastically.  I bit my tongue, though, because it was in that moment that I saw a true believer in the Bible.  Not necessarily in Christianity, but in the bible.  Maybe it should be its own religion.  Not that it is a bad or wrong belief, but a belief in which the reader submits to its authority, and yes, allows themselves to be slightly brainwashed.

I think it is a much more beautiful thing when one can think for themselves, outside the lines of authority, and question authority, to create good.  To reanimate the more loving myths of our history.