Galatea

I know many, many people from class have commented on Pygmalion and Galatea already, but I found an interesting reference to the story in a place I never thougt I would. In the Robin Williams movie Bicentennial man, based on a novella by Isaac Asimov, a robot struggles to become a man and learn what the 'human condition' is and what it means to experience it.



In the movie he meets his female counterpart (on the right), another robot who is like him in many ways:






Including his desire to become human. The name of this statue that became a woman?

Galatea, of course :)

Orpheus

Yet another story from Metamorphoses I love is that of Orpheus and Eurydice. I guess I am just a sucker for love stories, and this one is one of the best. A man loses the love of his life on their wedding day, and makes journeys through heaven and hell - literally - to find her again. I especially love the hearbreaking scene illustrated above, where Orpheus loses his love a second time.

This story reminds me I recently saw of a movie starring Robin Williams in which a man descends into hell to rescure his wife, who has comitted suicide. It is wonderful movie, I highly recommend it!

Caesar

Caesar's death in the HBO series Rome


The account of the deah of Julius Caesar and the rise of Augustus was one of my favorite stories of the Metamorphoses. Thus far, we have read many, many stories but all of them have been about fictional or supernatural beings. It was a intersting change of pace to read a story we know to be real and historical and have it placed in this context.

I especially love the lines "Though the gods/ had sent these omens, that was not enough/ to curb the course of fate and human plots" It goes back to the divine vs. man conflict shown in Antigone yet manages to show it in an entirely different way. Here, rather than show that the gods are supreme beings and all happens according to their wishes, it shows them as almost less than divine, for the events that befell Caesar were not to ethir liking and tried to show it. Yet for all their omens and communcation they were no match for the free will of mankind.

Bacchae

The famous Robert Herrick poem "To the Virgins" reminded me very much of Dionysus and those who followed in his image. I like to think that Dionysus and those like him, Elvis, Jim Morrison, James Dean, anyone, would have had a very 'carpe diem' outlook on life. They lived in the present, or at times the past, but never the future. Never worried, just living and enjoying.

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he 's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he 's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

So Who Could Play Apollo?

Just a random wondering....

Someone in class suggested today that a proper actor to play Dionysus would be Orlando Bloom, and I am having a difficult time thinking of someone better.

Now I'm no Orlando Bloom fan, but even I have to admit that if you put him in a toga with a laurel wreath on his head and handed him a tall glass of red wine, you woudl have the ideal Bacchus.

But then this got me wondering, who then would play his antithesis Apollo? I can think of dozens of Dionysuses, but not a single Apollo....

Walt Whitman and the Myth of the Eternal Return

Continuities

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form — no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.

Ample are time and space — ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold — the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again...

Symposium Under The Joshua Tree?

It's amazing how you think something is so familiar and nothing about it will surprise you, and then one day you open your eyes (or, in this case, your ears) and make a connection you never even considered before. Today, for example, I realized that a few of my favorite songs of all time had been sung thouasands of years ago at Plato's Symposium. Bono must have been channeling Plato when he wrote "I Still haven't found what I'm looking for" and "With or Without You," for the plights of the people in these songs are exactly those the men at the Symposium were discussing. Bono sings of a person who is desperately searching for that someone, or perhaps even something, that completes his soul, the other half of his tally, so to speak. Just look at a sample of the lyrics:

I have climbed highest mountains

I have run through the fields

Only to be with you

Only to be with you

I have run

I have crawled

I have scaled these city walls

These city walls

Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

If those aren't the words of someone trying to find their severed half, I'm not sure what is.

And as for "With or Without You," it sounds to me as if this expounds upon the difficulties that occur once that other half has been found. As Dr. Sexson said in class today, the pieces don't always fit, you may only think they should. Speaking from experience, however, I believe that sometimes even when the pieces do fit they don't match exactly. Nothing and nobody is perfect, after all. Anyone who has ever been in love knows what I mean, there are times you can't stand your other half, yet you know at the end of the day you couldn't survive without them now that you've found them. Bono says it much better than I:

My hands are tied

My body bruised, she's got me with

Nothing to win and

Nothing left to lose

And you give yourself away

And you give yourself away

Hear the whole song and watch the music video (I highly recommend it, fantastic song and interesting video!) right here.

Tally-Ho

Being part of the tally demonstration got me thinking very, very hard about the subject. This, more than anything from this class so far, applies to my life right now as I am dealing with some separations and farewells of my own.
Now Katey and I split an actual physical tally, in our case a note card with a very intersting quote on it, and at first I felt sad thinking about how many people I had said goodbye to seemingly without anything to remember them by. I wished today's society still had a practice like that, something deep and sentimental as reminders of someone you had to leave. Later, however, I sat talking to a friend on the phone and used an idiom someone we both had formerly known used frequently, and it stoppepd me mid-sentence.
I realized how foolish I had been. Society had not lost the practice of the tally, it had simply changed it's form. We no longer split coins, but we do split souls. Thinking about this more and more I realzied that everyone is fragmented because every single time you get to know a person, you both exchange a piece of your souls, or at least your minds. Take the phone incident for example. Neither of us have seen the person who used this phrase in years, and we definitely did not break a coin, index card, or otherwise when he left. But now I am certain we left our mark on each other, even if that mark is something as insignificant as an addition to my personal vocabulary.

Each and every person you meet you take something from and give something to, though you may not realize it. My mom always tells me that everything happens for a reason, even the bad, and I have come to believe that what happens when you part comes from the tally you split; the pieces of your souls, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, you break when you leave one another.