Theresa Brown Day 2

"From first to last Ariadne's story is woven into a crown." - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

We were mainly focused on housekeeping things today.We talked about the Eleusinian initiation, where something was said, done, and seen. A metamorphisis would then take place, and when others would ask these people would respond with "mystos" which gave rise to the word mystery in the English language. What they were trying to say was that you must go through the experience in order to understand what had happened to them. This course (and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony) is structured along the lines of in mediares which means starting in the middle and working one's way to the ends of a story (either beginning or end). We learned that Mnemosynein (memory) is the mother of the muses. We discussed that abduction is a very common theme in mythology. We discussed how we look, but do not see, and that to see we must look through a mythological lens. I also have a note about how laurel leaves gained their signifigance from a story of Apollo chasing a nymph and she turned into a laurel tree. We were also more specific about what is supposed to go into these blogs (notes, visual enhancement, a quote, insights/discoveries. Other specifics on this are in the syllabus.

I haven't read much again in the books. I did find a creation story that I liked, and thought we were going to share with the class today. I was just listening to a song playing on my roommate's computer that stated that "it's already written, so baby come on". I believe the song is about a guy encouraging his girlfriend to agree to marry him, but everything that has happened will happen. I just happened to think of how it related to our notions of mythological influence in our lives (much of which nowadays is written), so in a very real sense (from our perspective) it is already written, and will happen again. The guy is encouraging his girlfriend to live out her story. One of us mentioned in a blog that Europa carried a basket with her destiny on it, which lead to the part about we look but do not see. This reminded me of Sherlock Holmes (who repeatedly says something similar to that), and how we must observe, but that is not enough. To observe the cow in the sea on the basket may not have actually been a connection to Io, it was but the knowledge of Io's fate would be needed to make that deduction. So one must have the knowledge in order to make the deductions making our observations informative. Was that geeky enough for everyone?