Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Ritual De Lo Habitual

"But such is Zeus: any old oak tree. Only Zeus can sustain the wonder of normality (319)."
"covered now by three days, we saw shadows of the morning light, the shadows of the evening sun, til the shadows and the light were one" Eh what's a blog without some Jane's Addiction, Ritual De Lo Habitual (funny, I know someone who thinks Perry Farrell is a satyr). Three days, three days in an ordinary mythology. Cyclical and ritual, forever paying homage to Order. I wake up at 5:30 in the morning. Feed the cats. Smoke. Clean litter box. Get ready for work and school. Brush my cat. Make sure all doors and widows are locked. Upon exiting I check 5 times to see if the garage door is shut, once in each mirror and twice over the shoulder.
Once I get in my car the all day music worship begins. At work, we all have various morning rituals for the purposes of cleanliness and order (music is worshipped faithfully all day, by all present). Work. Class. Shower. Dinner. Homework. Cartoons, dessert, and vitamins. Bed.  Three days go by without variation.  All other days the variation is slight. What is the point of all this repetition? Why carry on the same tasks in the same order day after day, faithfully and continually? Order. Ritual is a way of bringing order to the chaos that is life. Performing rituals is a way of exercising control over our lives and actively participating in our existence.
Rituals are performed often at or soon after birth in the form of naming ceremonies or christenings. Rituals are performed to restore or renew the land. Rituals are performed at death, but from birth until death rituals are a part of our lives. Rituals can bring us closer to our environment, our families, our communities, and even ourselves.  
The reasons why rituals are performed and how they are performed is very complex. Inspired by this complexity I chose the Japanese ritual of Seppuku to present in class. Seppuku was a form of ritual suicide reserved for the Samurai class in ancient Japan.  Seppuku is currently illegal in Japan and the last Seppuku was committed in 1970 as a protest.  Seppuku, also know as Hara-kiri or Hari-kari, literally means "stomach cutting" and was an key part of the Bushido or warrior code. Seppuku was used by warriors to keep from falling into enemy hands or to rid oneself of shame. Warriors could be ordered to commit Seppuku by their feudal lords or could use Seppuku as the ultimate protest when their morals stood in the way of executing a master's order. Seppuku is very complex, has many forms, and is of course different for women. 
I decided to focus on the most formal performance of Seppuku.  Dressed ceremonially with his sword in front of him the participant writes his death poem. After completing the poem, with his selected attendant or his second standing behind him, he wraps a cloth around the base of his sword then opens his kimono and plunges the sword into his abdomen. First he cuts right to left, then slightly upward. After the upward cut he lowers his head and his second, usually a trusted warrior and friend, then cuts off his head. In battle or other less formal settings the second may or my not be a part of the ritual. Like most rituals Seppuku produces more questions, for those outside of its practice, than answers.
Rituals are not only something that is done, but something that is done to exercise power over our lives and ourselves. Through the practice of rituals we are active participants in our existence and not mere bystanders witnessing the drama of the gods played out in an endless cyclical narrative.   

Saturday, October 1, 2011

"love, disfigure, amputate"

"He is Risen" by Jack Kevorkian
"For it was in that eye, as he carried her off, that Kore saw herself reflected. It was then that this girl within the eye became the pupil for us all. As if the eye only now stormed out on a raid from the kingdom of the dead. Vision was a prey. And the eye pounced from the shadows to capture a girl and shut her away in the underworld palace of the mind. The meaning of Kore in Hades' eye is twofold: on the one hand, insofar as Kore sees herself in her abductor's eye, she discovers reflection, duplication the moment in which conciousness observes itself: and paradoxically that duplicated gaze is also the ultimate of visions; it can't be divided up anymore, for every further division would merely be a confirmation of the first. (210)"
My thoughts after class Thursday September 29:  listening to acid bath on the way home, music swirling in and out of myth and dreams. thoughts of bozeman, my home. is it oz? and ozzy well he is relevant because his wife sharon is the man behind the curtain. i had a dream when i was 8yrs old that has never left me. it was before school and i was on the north playground at longfellow elementary when armed men dressed in black swat apparel and ski masks invaded the playground, ordering all of us to line up in front of the building.. i reach for my back pack and find that my milk has has spilled all over inside of it. while all of the other children lined up as instructed, i was shaking the milk out of my back pack by the seesaws. suddenly the leader of the armed masked men approached me it was bill cosby. our eyes met briefly then he stabbed me in the thigh and i exploded into a fountain of blood. oz does not change or does it? is bozeman...dax screams "her chin is wet with some one's hate, love, disfigure, amputate"...wait a minute wasn't there a nordic creation story about hate, jealousy, and dismemberment? isn't rape a vehicle of both separation and initiation? all systems shut down and i become possessed by this lyric. it is origin stories about dismemberment and monsters. it is the separation of the egg or amorphous blob. it is a painting by jack kevorkian. it is apollo and his lyre, it is the "unending gifts the gods enjoy and the sufferings of men". it is separation, initiation, and transformation hitting me all at once, making perfect sense, and like all things mythological absolutely true and absolutely everywhere. love is separation, initiation is pain and pain disfigures, transformation involves amputation of sorts and often a return to the amputated. it is the marriage of cadmus and harmony, the last time the gods celebrated alongside humans. the gods loved us and we loved them, this love separated us and our relationship with the gods disfigured, in order to achieve transformation we amputated ourselves from the gods (or did they amputate themselves from us?) i get the oz thing but i don't like it. people move here because they love it. their presence and what it brings disfigures the valley and then they leave (others replace them) and amputate themselves from the valley. the valley itself is transformed. bozeman is enchanted though we even used to have our very own leprechaun, tommy. what was it that tommy used to say..phantasm....that's it phantasmagorical! a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream. phantasmagorical.

So those are my thoughts on our last class meeting and Dr. Sexson that is the paiting I was telling you about, now to read some of my classmates blogs, which to be honest i haven't done at all yet. I'm currently closing out Cadmus and Harmony, starting The Magus, and reading Eliade.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Class notes 9/29
Sacrifice= to make sacred
Dionysus- destroys order
Hero's solve the problems of the beginnings. ex. the slaying of the Minotaur born of an unnatural union
Creation:  4. male god creates by voice
                3. created from the body of a goddess
                2. created by female with male counterpart usually a snake
                1. created by female alone