Metacognition: Jane Eyre Writing assignment.

At the start of this writing assignment, I had no idea what I was gonna write. I was expecting to let the conversation flow, and that's exactly what my group and I did. We started talking, trying to think in the mindsets of the people we were trying to represent (an academite, a producer, and Charlotte Bronte). It felt like a normal conversation, with relative flow.

It was all under the premise that the producer was trying to rewrite Jane Eyre, in a modern setting, similar the relationship between A Thousand Acres and King Lear. Although this created some motivation to keep the conversation going, the conversation seemed restricted to only this topic, if only slightly.

I didn't really have any major change of thought about Jane Eyre, the novel, by doing this project. The things I said in the transcript were ideas I had already concluded to, and nothing particularly mind-blowing arose from the conversation, as we were most concerned with the problem of talking to the producer about a 21st century Jane Eyre.

Besides these minor setbacks, I thought the project had relative success, and It gave me a concise reorganizing of the thoughts I had about the novel within the boundaries of the prompt assigned.

Metacognition: Jane Eyre

While reading the last section of Jane Eyre, my feelings towards the book plummeted from grand expectation to a feeling of disappointment.

I was hoping for the book to leave me with some emotional impact, I was expecting some sort of pluck to my heart-strings. Each time something happened, first it was reuniting with Rochester, and then his eye-sight returning, I was expecting a stronger tragedy to balance out the bliss, to give the ending incomplete closure. When I discovered that every single major character in the book finds happiness and basically lives happily ever after, my mind immediately downgraded the value it had attributed to the rest of the novel. I was surprised at how fast my mind shifted its view.

In all honesty, the first time reading through, I did not understand the content of the last page, where St. John's life is described. After discussing the topic in class, and why it was there, and significant and what not, I came to better term with Jane Eyre. The ending can still be interpreted in multiple, interesting, and very significant and important ways on a deeper level. However, I still feel that ostensibly the ending lacks credibility. I had decided that you need to have a solid foundation (the surface meaning) before you can engineer the finer points in literature, especially for such and action/occasion oriented book such as Jane Eyre.

360 degrees: Space Exploration

The exploration of space is a monumental endeavor taken up by humanity. Using sophisticated tools like the Hubble space telescope, for example, we have been able to observe the visible universe from thousands of light years away. Coincidentally, due to this we are staring thousands of years into the past as well, greatly enriching the institution of Science and opening up new questions. However, amidst benefits, there are many associated issues with space exploration.

For one, it is a very risky procedure. Sending astronauts and cosmonauts into space, whether to

walk on the moon, or to repair the Hubble telescope, is life threatening. Even a minor miscalculation

can potentially cause an end to the mission, and to the lives of those executing it.

Secondly, is it really right for governments to spend billions of dollars funding space programs when

there is so much work to do to improve humanity? If the purpose OF space exploration is to

enhance Science, and the purpose of Science to understand the world, which would make life

better for people, then the direct approach would be more efficient.

Also, in the sake of exploring, the Earth hasn't been completely explored yet either. We may be

jumping ahead of ourselves exploring beyond our planet before we explored our planet itself.

Others might also say that as humans we destroy everything we set foot on, and by colonizing

space we would merely start a long trek of slowly destroying the universe.

On the brighter side, space exploration has also become a vehicle for peace. With the construction

of the International Space Station, some 16 countries contribute to, collaborate, and cooperate

beyond the confines of the Earth. The more countries are involved, the more interconnected the

world becomes, with common goals, making war an increasingly difficult thing to achieve.

Lastly, the prospects of discovering the unknown, for understanding the universe, and

accomplishing the once impossible feeds the curiosity of many people. This creates a sort of

distraction (like television might for some) from the problems that ail the world today. Almost like

glimmer of hope, to find that which is greater than ourselves.

Dialectics: Suffering and Happiness

It may seem as though that suffering and happiness are polar opposites. After all, how can one be happy, if he is suffering? Does not suffering impede happiness? And yet, one cannot exist without the other.

In a life without suffering, where you have only happiness, one would have a life devoid of some meaning. Some sort of 'emptiness' would preside. Without something to contrast against, the happiness loses its luster, and becomes the norm. Now there is no happiness and no suffering.

In a life of pure suffering, where there is no concept of happiness, the same principle applies. Without happiness to contrast the suffering to, suffering becomes the norm, the reality of life, and once again you have neither.

The greater the suffering it seems, the less it takes to please. From suffering comes much emotion, and much artistism. If Edgar Allen Poe had not suffered in his childhood, he would have had nothing to inspire his poetry. It is the taste of the forbidden fruit (happiness in this case) but the general lack of it, that creates a hole in the human heart. This hole is filled with emotion, with art, and with thought, much of which appeals to said lack of happiness.

Perhaps suffering is not "good", but good for us. Perhaps suffering is something people should learn to accept, and to expect, and in the long run, maybe even cherish, as means of expanding the soul.

Blogging Around

In response to Anna, on literary figures (and people in general) obsessing over the insignificant details of life, in particular The Manager, from "Heart of Darkness" :

Anna, although I agree with you on your take on the over-caring on the mundane details of life, I would have to disagree on its application to literature. I would argue that you are ~supposed~ to feel frustrated with The Manager on his small mindedness. That you aren't supposed to identify him, but see him in the way that you do, with a sense of almost disgust. In "the Little Prince", the little prince visits multiple planets on the way to Earth. On each of these lives an adult who each do a similar over-caring over tedious insignificant things.

In response to Patrick, on drum solos, and music as a language, with a structure to be followed and expanded upon:

You are absolutely right. For music, it would be keeping in time, for piano in particular (which is what I play), there would also be sticking to a chord progression as well. In art, there are the principles and elements of design (unity and movement, to name a few). Writing has the rules of language. All of these are languages though. All art forms have three qualities that are expressed to the receiving end: form, emotion, and thought. Music appeals first and foremost to emotion, visual arts to form, and writing to thought. But the rules that are made for each of these languages, are made to be broken. Once you know the rules, (and you do HAVE to know the rules first) you can experiment and create the bold and the avant garde. Oh, and that's a great drum solo by the way.

BEST OF WEEK: Cathedral.

We read the short story "Cathedral" in class. By the end of our discussion about it, as a class we reached the conclusion that language can create limitations to the conveying of experience. The narrator of the story purposely uses ambiguous language (i.e. "it's really something") to avoid putting his epiphany in concrete terms. In concrete terms, the sense of an epiphany is no longer presented, merely a series of events, and it would also put the narrator out of his normal voice, dissolving the credibility of the story.

There isn't a language in the world that would be able to convey the experience of epiphany, of sudden realization. And yet the language is needed to guide the reader towards the epiphany. Perhaps purposely ambiguous language can provide insight because it reflects the natural ambiguity of life itself. Then it wouldn't be the language that is limiting in the expressing of metaphysical experience, but the tendency to mentally put concepts in terms of time and space. For example, in the previous sentence, i'm describing ideas/concepts, and i have them put in time and space, which act like a physical sort of canvas, or box, into which something purely conceptual is being placed into.

In my writing, I could use ambiguous language to aid in the expression of my experiences as well. This would take much work however, as if done poorly, the effect is lost, and there is nothing concrete to back up the failed technique.

What If? -irony.

In class we were talking about irony. Irony is an interesting concept. By Wikipedia definition "..from the Ancient Greek εἰρωνεία eirōneía, meaning hypocrisy, deception, or feigned ignorance) is a situation, literary technique, or rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity, discordance, or unintended connection with truth, that goes strikingly beyond the most simple and evident meaning of words or action."

My thinking is this: What if everything we do, every single human or non-human action and thought, in some way ironic? By definition, humanity would either have some sort of incongruity, discordance, or unintentionally hint at Truth. By all of these three facets of the definition, humanity, and our entire existence, is either fundamentally illogical, and also probably completely unaware of Truth.

The first seems to be true. Half of humanity's history doesn't make sense from a single point of view. Easy example, the Holocaust. It makes no sense on the road of progress, especially after the enlightenment period happening, with religion existent especially. Aren't the ideals of religion supposed to stop these sorts of things from occurring? These events do have causes and effects, and reasons behind them, and motivations, if looked at in a different frame.

Strangely though, none of our existence as a species in general is logical. We don't think we are living meaninglessly, we believe in Progress. And for the course of our history we have been Progressing. Progressing towards what? How can you progress without a goal? We don't know what our goal is. Maybe that goal is to figure out why we are here, then hell we're doing the wrong thing.

Assuming the previous paragraph true, than the ironic thing to impose on top of it would be that our lives DON'T have meaning after all, that we spend our lives trying to find something that's not there. That absence of meaning is a Truth.

Now everything being ironic would render everybody and everything naive to the reality to the world. Then what if another layer was also existent? Suppose we were all acutely AWARE of our ironic lives. We would be able to see our asinine existence, but we wouldn't be able to do anything about it. We would know we are living ironic lives, and would ironically continue living them.

Its ironic, because in reading that last paragraph, the reader is now slightly aware, or looking for cues of such irony in their life. Here's the scary part? What if all of the ideas previously written without serious contemplation or reasoning actually all TRUE. There would be no way to escape the irony. We would be living lives, each pitiful life alive, but with no purpose to be alive, and completely aware of it. And nothing could be done about it without being ironic. Suicide would have to be ironic; the individual transcending from an existence of no meaning, to a 'non-existence' of still no meaning. Everyone would still have to (ironically) go on with daily business and continue our Progress inventing atom bombs, and super bombs, and uber bombs, and uber computers, and computer bombs, etc.

And with the feeling of successfully describing the world in a short blog post, I bid you all farewell.

Connection: Post-Modernism/Modernism and Bioshock

During our class's discussion, outlining the differences between modernism and postmodernism, I kept referring all the new concepts in terms of 'Bioshock' a video game designed for the xbox360 console. I have been playing this game recently on account of a recommendation by my friend for its artistic value.

The general premise of this first person shooter, macabre style game is as follows: You are a man who has just survived a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic. It is set in the 1960s. In the water, you stumble upon a strange construction, in which, a bathysphere takes you down to a submerged city, built by 'Andrew Ryan' to escape the confines of 'big society and its phony ethics, where great men can be great'. Upon your arrival, you are contacted via portable radio by a man called 'Atlas' who guides you throughout the city, Rapture, filled with its crazed, and very violent inhabitants. The opening sequence is provided with the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNtHY8Igf0

In most respects, Bioshock is presented in a very modernist way. Each new 'experience' or completed mission, reveals something about yourself as a character, or what had happened to the city, and characters (like Andrew Ryan), who have left obvious visible marks, have contributed to the demise of Rapture. So is the concept of memory. Periodically throughout the game, random sepia images, of maybe a house, or what can be assumed maybe a family, are shown, as flashbacks. Later on in the game, after being betrayed by Atlas, you discover none of those memories are real, they are a product of mental conditioning, and that you are playing as something sort of a biological experiment, created in a lab. If according to Proust a life of memory is the only chance for a life of meaning, then the life of this character no longer has any. This happens to be ironic, as you are trying to find meaning, the motivation for playing the game, which is the proper response to the human condition in modernism.

However, there is also a post-modern aspect to Bioshock. Very frequently, haphazardly as everything else in the ruined city, you can find tape recordings by various major, and minor, characters in the game among the corpses and empty shell casings. These recordings, from multiple points of view help provide the pieces of a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, which help create an understanding of the situation. At the same time, in this itself, is mediation experience. All the the things said in tape recordings were said by people years ago, people who might not even be alive at the moment. Even Atlas, who initially guides you, does not speak to you face to face. And all this 'experience' is then mediated by the television screen the player is looking at. There is as a sense of irony, for when you discover that you were mentally conditioned to comply with Atlas's requests when he utters the phrase 'would you kindly', you never did have a choice. As long as you are playing the game, it is programmed in a way that in essence, all your long term goals are governed by somebodies directions.

I am still in the process of playing this game, so I still do not know how most of the story fits in place. I am very excited, however, to find out.

Metacognition: 1st Semester

I do not feel as though my general thought process has changed very dramatically from the start of the school year. Sure, some new ideas have been manifested, others replaced, but that is normal mental growth which comes from experience and pondering, without any radical shift. The only thing is that perhaps I am becoming progressively more analytical. This began with our dissection of King Lear, and interpretations upon world placement within sentences, for example the sentence, "I nothing am". This process of analyzing has continued all the way up to our current poetry unit, analyzing poems like snowflakes, by Longfellow, and nothing gold can stay by Frost. As for philosophical thinking, which always has been something I loved to do, the opportunity to get a glimpse of multiple philosophies throughout history, and lots of varying points of view on life made me reconsider some of my opinions. The best example of this, I used to consider myself purely a rationalist, believing that only logic could be used to discover Truth. However, somewhere in Sophie's world it was mentioned that human logic is faulty, because it is derived from our sensory experiences, which are relative. In any case, that is the inference I had made. I came to support that when I think of any great work of art that we analyze. I find it unlikely that every single layer that we dissect and attribute to symbolism was created purposely, and with the same same interpretation as we do. Thus the remaining creative force would have to come from Muses, the subconscious, I don't really know, but something illogical but beautiful.