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"' Nothing beautiful or charming ever comes to a man except through the Charites'" p. 84 The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Let's try this again. Originally I had the Elaide listing in here too, but something got really screwy with the typing of this post. I only hit backspace, I don't know what happened there. I'll have to put that up in a separate post. For some reason my Elaide listing went to my student account, when every other email I've had in this class has come to my regular Gmail account. This normally wouldn't be a problem, except I logged in this blog under my regular, so I have to sign out of that to get to the other inbox to open the attachement to get the list.
Jason told his creation story today, which was the same one that Andrew told us last Tuesday. We stated that etiology is how to be, and that ontology is the study of being. We also spoke of Hamlet's sililoquey (I highly doubt I spelled that right). We spoke of the evolution of the names Zeus and Jupiter. It all started with Dyaus which went to Dayeus, and then to Zeus, then to Ju with Piter for father. The last one ended up being spoken, or at least written as only one word, and so it became Jupiter. We spoke of the three phases that this class will go through. The first phase being beginnings or separation, which we are in now. The second phase is initiation, the middle, and will be focusing on pain. The third phase is transformation, the ending. Dr. Sexson drew three circles on the board to demonstrate his point. The first circle is whole, the second is split in two, and the third loods whole but is perferated. To understand these circles is to understand the class. We spent some time sharing some people's earliest memories. I swear that my very first memory is either getting in trouble for taking off the eye-patch, or some vague memory about lying on a couch in semi-darkness while people sat talking at the dining room table behind the couch, where it was well lit. I told the eye-patch story in class. We talked about how all early memories are the same (or similar) and congregate about the communal beginnings. The snake also gets a very bad reputation in mythology, for some reason he is always a trouble maker. Dr. Sexson did go over the list in class, but as I knew about the forthcoming email I didn't write the list down.
I've been trying to get into The Magus, but it's still slow for me. That's the book I've been trying to focus on because it has great potential, but is taking a very long time to get the ball rolling. Dr. Sexson has encouraged us to use online resources for reading Calasso's book, because it is very difficult going. I've read stuff on this level before, but not as a story book. This is much closer to a text book than I had thought. It does have some great thinking sentences. What are the Charities? Why must everything beautiful and charming come through them? But then it is a sign that there is good in the world, for good gives extras.