My last post

Time to tie up some lose ends from this semester:

My presentation today:

Sometimes I feel like life is one big, mean-spirited joke, and I'm the only one in on it. Life is so redundant and pointless. But I keep on getting up every morning and coming back like the cat that would go away, the cat came back the very next day. I mean, do I really have to deal with the same girl who has a conversation on her damn cellphone so loud everyone can hear? Or that idiot with the stupid clothes, I mean really who wears that stuff? I want to punch him in the back of the head. Or this damn cold that hovers around me like a rain storm? So I started asking myself where I could find answers to this mess, and the Slave and Ecclesiastes seemed reasonable. However, all I got from it was that I need to realize life is pointless and enjoy it while I still have it which is hard to do some days because of the likes of you people. And that's what really my paper is about, why I do anything at all because it would be a lot easier to do nothing.

There was a philosopher named Albert Camus who said the most important philosophical question we can ask ourselves is whether we should kill ourselves. This is morbidly depressing, but it does beg the question: why bother with life?



Most of us live our lives chasing after things to distract ourselves from our eventual Death. The fact is, we take life way too seriously. Jacob (from the Slave) also lived this way, and like many of us, he was miserable. The Book of Eclesiastes, according to Frye, tells us, "we should relax and our real energies begin to flow into the soul", and "the secret to wisdom is detachment without withdrawal". We should all take a step back from our chaotic lives and remember life is short, don't et caught up in the "vanity" as Koheleth would call it. If you get too focused on the "vanity" your life will be miserable.

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Here's something that I wrote concerning Jonah, but I never finished it:

Jonah was a pious man, gregarious, generally happy, and in good health. He lived a simple life as the Lord intended. Pray, sacrifice, worship, any religious term you name, he did it. He did it well. When God first came and told him that He was going to blow up Ninevah. Jonah said, "Blow up? Like Rambo?" God said, "You bet your ass, Jonah, you bet your ass." Jonah was a tad horrified. He didn't sign up to be a terrorist. He didn't sign up to be a crusader. He didn't sign up to be a repetitious asshole. No, he signed up for the God of sex, be fruitful and multiply. He wanted a God that would give him women. Jonah knew that was shallow, but sheol, he was a shallow f**k. He liked giving into the simpler, lustful pleasures of his existence. Didn't Solomon say, "Oh vanities of vanities, all it vanity"? Life is in vain, and Jonah reckoned, he might as well enjoy getting down and dirty with his sinful self.

Socially speaking, Jonah may put on good show, but he didn't like people in a recreational sense. In truth, he hated almost everybody, not excluding himself, whom he held a particular distaste for. That is why Jonah didn't want to inform the sinful lot in Ninevah that they would all die in a very painful way. He didn't like dealing with people, plus God would make it really painful. God didn't do not painful. He told Jonah all about the pain and the suffering and agony and the sun that could be blocked out by gourds but it wasn't and that pissed Jonah off, because honestly, he sunburned easily, and well, f**k off. And so it went, and so it went, and so it went, that Jonah felt morally ablidged to warn the people of Ninevah that they were all going to die, amen. However, though he may have been guilt tripped into being morally ablidged, he had no intention of carrying out the morally ablidging of it all.

Jonah snuck off in secret at midnight, cloak wrapped around his body. No God could surely see him fleeing away this late into the night? Jonah hopped aboard a ship, and he cast his lots that God was completely oblivious to the whole affair. Finally relaxing, enjoying the solitude from this Michael Bay like God, he fell asleep and dreamt of happier things not involving Rambo. Bunnies were hopping on a grassy hill, a metallic door opened in the side of the hill and out came a vacuum cleaner. This confused Jonah on a number of levels, mainly on a personal level because he had just shared a cleaning experience with a similar vacuum. Ah crap, now things took a bizarre turn. Monsters emerged, one purple, one green, one yellow, and one red, all with antennas on their bulbous bloated heads. They shrieked and giggled with what could only be a demonic possession. Television screens lit their sick bellies full of fat and girth, ick. Jonah screamed in disgust, grabbed an uzi, and did what was best. Then he woke up in a sweat, and some sailor with a cigar growled about tourists, and left him alone in peace. The days past slowly and with a calmness about them that reassured Jonah that God had been aptly fooled. He was sure he had seen the last of that omniscient deity. Taking out an ornate pipe, Jonah smoked and blew rings. He was merry. Smile plastered on his face like the smiley face head from Wal-mart, he relaxed for what he was sure was eternity. The gentiles on board the ship gave him nervous glances. Surely this jew had lost his mind? Then the sky turned black, and the gentiles looked up nervously. With a bang, the sky lit up. Jonah smirked. "You found me." He was sure he had given the Greatness the slip. Banging with what could only be righteous anger, the heavens let their waters fall upon his restless head, burning his ample sun burns.

The sailors screamed with the typical sea-faring storm lingo. The whole affair confused Jonah, who had not read Moby Dick and was therefore completely oblivious to anything having to do with sailing. Men ran to and fro, and Jonah sank into the background. For awhile things seemed like they would work themselves out. The storm was letting up and the ship stopped swaying back and forth like a maraca. However, that was simply God building suspense, and He wailed on the crew like Poseidon. God had truly forsaken his poor servant. Jonah wiped away tears and shouted above the nonsense, "It is me! Kill me! Throw me overboard! I am unsightly before He that is good and great and all in between! Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!" The sailors looked at each other with "that crazy jew" look.

"Sorry dude, you aren't going no where. Keep yourself safe now and don't do anything rash," one of them said.

"So be it, but you will certainly die."

The sailor gave another a knowing glance, pulled straws out of his pocket. "Here, take one, if you get a short one, we'll throw you over." Jonah clenched his tongue between his teeth, grabbed one. "Well, you got it." The sailor kicked Jonah in the chest and he plummeted overboard, greeting the sea like a dead mule.

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Here's something else, concerning my feelings at the time (Nov 20th, it appears by the marker). It also has to deal somewhat with my paper and "vanity" I suppose:

I wish nobody died, and I wish nothing went away. I don't want to miss anything, and I don't want my family to die, and I don't want to leave school. I want to feel either everything or nothing, and I want to love somebody so much it hurts. Stare into her eyes until the universe falls away, and wax philosophy late into the night when the infomercials are on and Billy Mays lives. I want to watch childhood movies until I die, and I want to play make believe in that empty field across the street. Long, dried up grass stretched forever, and the grasshoppers chirped, and Everyday was an adventure, and everyday I was someone new: a jedi, a transformer, a pokemon trainer, a grasshopper hunter, a podracer pilot, Link searching for the triforce, getting married at the alter, staring at the sky and imagining God was giving me signs in the clouds, collecting ants in a tin can, and believing I would never grow up. I would whisper all this, that Fern Gully terrified me, that I would cry in daycare everyday when my mom was late in picking me up, that I always dreamed of leaving this planet behind like Levon's Jesus, that the world seemed too small for me, that I would never be the person I always wanted to be and my predictions came true, that I cried myself to sleep more than one night because I knew I was growing older and it would some day all end. She would smile and tell me everything is going to be okay. Then I would smile back and tell her she is lying. I would tell her about the romantic mountains, how they represent the earth's harshness. We're not supposed to live here, I would say, on such a hostile world. Then I would tell her they are the most beautiful damn things I have ever seen, that they made the earth a romantic place and I would never do away with them. I would tell her about accounting, economics, politics, pop culture, science fiction, movies, television, books, poems, history, Say Anything, Animal Collective, Sunset Rubdown, Star Wars, and all the stupid crap that I think about that nobody else thinks about because it is stupid. And she would listen to it all and judge me like at the end of days. God, Moses, and Jesus will sit on their golden thrones, rubies sparkling in the ceiling, and they will shake their heads and call me unfit for their kingdom and be deemed inadequate. The gates will shut. But she won't do that, and I shall be set be free.

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I also promised a nude painting, so I searched and searched, but nothing satisfied me. If I'm going to do this it has to be great. Then I found a pretty good one with Zeus and two naked people. I think they are getting married because it's called "nuptials". Anyway, here it is:



Edit: image seems to have gone to heaven, sorry

Have a good winter break, you crazy kids.

second to last post

I learned nothing in Biblical Lit this semester, which is actually flattery, because Dr. Sexson helped me "remember" what I had forgotten. This is sounding a little vain (and not the Ecclesiastical vain; vain, vain), but I'm trying to go for an anamnesis moment... I only have two modes: extreme social phobia or egotistical ramblings... Oh the times we've had, the thing I'll remember the most: Every blog in this class has had at least one nude painting on it at some point in the semester. I haven't used up mine yet (one is the limit), I'll save it for my last post.

On a different note, I was listening to Coast to Coast AM last night. Apparently John Lennon made a pact with the devil for 20 years of success, but on the 20th year he would die. "Here's another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul". There's a picture of John Lennon from the Magical Mystery Tour album where in the background it says THe Best Way to Die is By MDC. MDC= Mark David Chapman is the guy who shot him. The only reason I bring this up is because I remembered the Robert Johnson story from last semester. He made a deal with devil to play the guitar. You know, I don't think making a deal with the devil has turned out good for anybody. Now, off to bed, but first watch some Golden Girls.

My Paper

My unedited paper with errors and no work cited:

I wake up like always: in the most comfortable damn position ever. My legs are in the perfect spot; the pillow is like a soft bunny under my fat head; and my arms are awkwardly placed, yes, but still pretty okay. I'm warm, happy, with a hazy, sleepy, morning high, and prancing puppy dogs float away from some grand dream. How can it get any better than this? Why bother with this whole "life" thing? I'm perfectly awesome right here, thank you very much. But I stand anyway and sway from side to side. Whispering disgusting profanities under my breath that would make Penn Jillette blush, I stumble onward to the shower. My eyes are closed. I wish I could stay inside this hyperbolic time chamber (a.k.a. shower) forever, forgetting about the evil outside world. But I head to class in the dreary cold and plague. The horribly romantic mountains are in the distance, and all the people laugh around me in their horribly hip clothes. I would probably mock them to my friends, but inside I secretly want to be like them. The mountains fade away, thank God, and I sit in class, wondering where my life will end up after all this. I don't want to do anything really except read, watch movies, and generally avoid most other people. In "Office Space", when Peter is asked what he would do if he won a million dollars, he says, "Nothing [...] I would relax. I would sit on my ass all day. I would do nothing." The man says back, "Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit." I will return to this later, but Peter raises a good point. Is life really worth all this stress? Albert Camus said the most important philosophical question is whether a person should commit suicide or not. And in many ways, both The Book of Ecclesiastes and The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer ask this question. Why continue on with this life thing?

"Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2) says the opening lines of Ecclesiastes. In the tradition it is Solomon who wrote these words, but to many experts, this man or woman is named Koheleth. Koheleth continues on, "A generation goes, but the earth remains forever " (Ecclesiastes 1:4). In an almost melodramatic tone, the writer poetically lists through the ever present earth's processes. The sun will always rise and set. The wind will always blow. The streams will always run to the sea. The eye will never be satisfied with what it is seeing, and the ear never satisfied with what it is hearing. Koheleth says, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done," and then laments that "there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Koheleth seems to be having a mid-life crisis. However, unlike most middle-aged men, he doesn't buy an expensive car and start wearing cool comb-overs. No, he (or she) writes his struggles down, and what he (or she) particularly appears to be struggling with is life's futility. Nothing a person does will last or be remembered, it will all eventually be washed away in the sands of time. We fool ourselves with illusions of importance, but these are "vanity". According to Northrop Frye, this vanity shouldn't be understood as a form of narcissism, but instead should be translated as fog. Frye describes it as such:

This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapor, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It thus acquires a derived sense of "emptiness," [...] To put Koheleth's central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness. (Frye 123)

Like Frye says, this image of emptiness recurs in the New Testament in Philippians 2:7 (something Frye calls Typology). The New American Standard Bible says Jesus, "emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men". What does the Bible mean when it tells us Jesus (in the words of the Weymouth New Testament) "strips Himself of His glory"? It is implying that there is something very different between the divine and mortals, and I would argue that thing is being able to die. Death makes what time we have very beautiful, but at the same time tragic, and it also reminds us that everything we see, feel, taste, smell, or hear are distractions on our march to death. Every person you meet, every mountain you see, every sidewalk you walk down are filled with "emptiness". Everything is empty, everything is in vain, because some day you will die, and there is nothing you can do about that. This is what Jesus means when he "makes himself nothing", he enters into a world of death and constant sorrow. Nobody leaves this place unscathed and nobody can die for you. The Gospels show us this in Jesus' ultimate sacrifice to men, and he does this by dying. Wallace Stevens wrote, "Death is the mother of beauty". Dying makes every moment precious, but it also makes every moment pointless. This is the problem Koheleth is dealing with.

Stretching this concept to the story of Jacob and Wanda-Sara in Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave, we see a man, Jacob, struggling with these same things. Jacob applies laws and rules to his life that appear to limit him. He is forbidden from all carnal pleasures. He cannot indulge himself in non-kosher foods and later even restricts himself to a strictly vegetarian diet. Most of all, he cannot marry the women he loves. Finally, when he does ease off his strict rules and marries Wanda, he doesn't find peace, but instead finds further pain. Now Jacob is a slave to something else: Wanda. He becomes a social outcast and disguises his wife as a mute. The threat of her discovery terrifies him, now he not only has to look after himself but Wanda and the coming baby too. When their ruse is finally uncovered, and Wanda dies in childbirth, Jacob is still a slave. He cannot escape her, he cannot escape their child, and he most of all cannot escape his laws. A ferryman, Waclaw, explains to Jacob (and the theme of the book), "You own a cow or a horse and you're its slave. Marry and you're the slave of your wife, her bastards, and her mother" (Singer 260). Jacob considers what he says, and reminds the ferryman not every one can be free. Who would raise children and grow food? Besides that, who would have had have him if his mother didn't? He answers back, "I didn't ask for it. She wanted to have a man, so she did" (Singer 260). Jacob discovers that the ferryman is right. He has been a slave all his life.

Waclaw is a very Koheleth-esque figure. He actively questions God and gets rid of all responsibilities because he realizes life's futility. In a very powerful moment, Waclaw tells Jacob:

What does anyone know? In India they worship snakes. The Jews put little black boxes on their heads, and shawls. I know. A lot of them used to use this ferry. But along gallops Chmielnicki; there were so many corpses floating in the Vistual the river stank. That's what their God did for them. (Singer 258)

Jacob tells him "the evildoers will be punished", and Waclaw has an answer for him right out of the Book of Ecclesiastes:

Where? There was a brute of a count in Parchev who flogged I don't know how many hundreds of peasants to death but he lived to be ninety-eight. His serfs set his castle on fire, and down came the rain and saved it. He died peacefully sipping a glass of wine. I say: the worms get everyone, good and bad. (Singer 258)

In the end, Jacob dies like everyone else. None of his sacrifices, laws, wives, friends, children, or respect can put off its inevitable embrace. This might not be the ultimate message Singer is trying to convey, but to me, it's just as important. Even the most pious, good, men die.

Like Jacob, we also focus on getting places, pointless goals, and the stress of the day. These things are, in the end, not important. Jacob lived this way and was miserable. He focused on goals and systems he believed would some day make him happy, but they didn't. He found the same old pain he had always had and was living in the way that Koheleth would call "vanity", pointless endeavors that distract us from our eventual death. Alan Watts offers a similar comparison to today's modern educational system. In kindergarten, children are prepared for First Grade, and the kindergartner rests his entire mind on the progression forward. When the child gets to First Grade, it's the same thing, but First Grade is now replaced with Second. And it continues with Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, middle school, college, and then into the job world with promotions. However, when it's over and the person reach as far as he or she can go, there will be a huge disappointment. He or she will realize they have forgotten to enjoy life, and instead, wasted their lives away on "vanity". Like most old men and women on their death beds, they will wish they would have focused on "important" things, and not the "trivial" ones. We are all like Jacob, slaves to our "vanities", distractions, and other such things. It is critical to step back from the madness. Sometimes we get so into the game, the "vanity", that we forget that it is just "vanity". This form of thinking will lead to a similar fate that Jacob fell.

I said earlier I felt Koheleth was having a mid-life crisis, and if he was alive today he would be driving around town in a fancy car with a goofy comb-over. However, Frye respectfully disagrees. Instead, what he suggests is that Koheleth knew exactly what he was doing and stumbled on something far more profound. I agree with his assessment, and take back my erroneous ways. If we instead realize that most of our activities are "trivial" and that in the future it will all end, then we can "relax and our real energies being to flow into the soul" (Frye 124). Frye says, "the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal" (Frye 123). Life is ultimately a series of hardships, sorrows, hang-ups, break-ups, happy drunk nights, sad drunk nights, weddings, deaths, children, friends, old men and women, first kisses, last kisses, drunk kisses, kisses that are huge mistakes, weeping because you are so happy, weeping because you are so sad, disaster after disaster, and love after love. Some days you will hate it, some days you will love it, and hopefully in your heart you will never want it to end, but you know it will. The Book of Ecclesiastes seems to be telling us to enjoy it while we are still here, but also don't get too attached. Your mother will die, your father will die, everyone you love will die, and you won't be remembered. Realize these facts today and your soul will be at peace, but if you forget sorrow will follow your every step. Finally, how would I respond to Peter in "Office Space" who simply wants to do nothing and flee from life? Frye reminds us, "All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them" (Frye 123). It is impossible to run away from our distractions like Waclaw tries. It will always catch up to us (like Jonah found). Life is too beautiful a thing to pass up.

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Well, well, well, I really wanted to write something good tonight. Don't think it's going to happen. To be honest I haven't touched by bible for months and Northrop Frye has dust on his cover (hyperbole, I opened it recently in search of good stuff for my paper), so I present myself before you today a ill-prepared man. Okay, now that's out of the way, thanks for continuing to read. I'm totally burnt out and am lacking any cohesive thoughts on anything. All my energy is in my paper, and since I don't have any reserves, this blog will suffer the results.