Child's Play

Thinking about our discussion in class and reading through Doll's House again, I do believe I know these people- Nora and Torvald- because I remember that I met them before.

This summer I was a nanny to four year old twins and a baby.  The twins, a boy and a girl, were masters of pretend.  Every day, I was treated to performances of superhero saving the princess from the tower, prince fighting monsters while damsel in distress watches on, baby boy and his mom going to the park, monkey and best friend girl hanging out at the pool, and so on.  It was an entertaining job.

Some days were more Disney fairy tale-like, but other performances were absolutely melodramatic.  One morning, I remember the twins were Spider-Man and princess, and Spider-Man was dying on the couch.  He pulled the princess in close so she could hear his last labored words and then he kissed her.   I am such a bad person, but I laughed.  It was heavy material for little kids, and they kissed.  I know they are little and are definitely innocent, but I don’t know.  The little girl blushed and came up to me and told me, “Miss Bizz—What?? it’s just pretend.”  The other nanny and I shared a glance, and I told her nothing was wrong, I just couldn’t imagine kissing my brother like that (the brother nearest to my age is 6 years older than me).  She anxiously told me that they kissed all the time, because they had to.  She was the princess and he was the superhero—she had to.  It’s what superheroes and princesses do. Her brother, in the meantime, was moaning in the background, begging her to return to the game as he bled to death (I think he was bleeding to death, I don’t remember his cause of death that day).  The little girl looked torn and confused, and eventually, she walked over to her brother and said, “Don’t be mad, I just don’t want to kiss you.”  He jumped up and said, “But I love you!” and he proceeded to chase her around the room so he could kiss her face. 

Even though I wasn’t intentionally trying to kill their game, I felt a lot like Kristine observing her friend Nora and trying to make her leave the illusion she and the guy created for themselves, I showed the little girl “real sunlight” and she kind of woke up.  The boy kept trying to cling to that aspect of the game, because he felt that was how it should be, but she could not unknow what she now knew. 

And I know this doesn’t relate to the Doll’s House, but I remembered this incident, because of our class discussion of the anagram “Insect” and “incest.” And I don't know where to go with that.

***** Adding on, I was just thinking now that Ibsen observes characters like a nanny to children.  He observes how the characters observe other characters to understand how they think people should act.  Who we are and what we do is just a copy of the person we observed, who was just a copy of someone else and so on.  I am not me- I am composed of several observations I have made from other people.  Is that how the disease spreads?  And what is the disease? Mob instinct/herd instinct?  The need to cling together?  A desire for "normalcy" whatever it is?  I don't think it's our existence at any rate.  I hope.

I can't see how Ibsen is a Scientist, but I can science in the play

Morten Kiil (resting his hands and his chin on the handle
of his stick and winking slyly at the DOCTOR). Let me see,
what was the story? Some kind of beast that had got into
the water-pipes, wasn’t it?
Dr. Stockmann. Infusoria—yes.
Morten Kiil. And a lot of these beasts had got in, according to Petra—a tremendous lot.
Dr. Stockmann. Certainly; hundreds of thousands of them,
probably.
Morten Kiil. But no one can see them—isn’t that so?
Dr. Stockmann. Yes; you can’t see them. (ACT II, Scene I EOTP)


When we read the Biographer's Tale and talked about Ibsen, I expected his play to ooze objectivity and science lingo.  I'm glad to find that that wasn't the case at all.  Science is the subject of interest, but the real action revolves around politics and societal conformity.  It was an interesting commentary on the individual versus the majority, but I'd have to agree with Maria, that I don't quite see how referring to bacteria makes him a scientist on the same level of Linnaeus and Galton. He might have grouped his characters into different stereotypes, (classified them, so to speak), but he seems to do so with prejudice.  The young are generally liberal, the older women are domestic and subservient and the men are . . . men.  Stockman has a crazy beard and is a crazy man.   


I think this passage above might be a link between Ibsen, science/bacteria and his study of humans. The tone mocks science, reducing it to the stuff of myth.  "No one can see them-- isn't that so?"  He sheds doubt on the situation by bringing up faith, the mentality of "even though we can't see it, we believe it is still there?"  It sounds funny, because we often think of science as irrefutable stuff.  Stockman tested his water samples.  He had his chemist friend confirm his suspicions.  And his father-in-law, who makes fun of the bacteria is weird and probably not a legit source.  But I like how this seed of dialogue foreshadows how everyone will accuse Stockman of lying.  They are afraid of what his science means and they kind of hunt him like he's a witch.

And now, I'm thinking a *Lightbulb*  

Stockman discovers something and wants the discovery to speak for itself (even though he has a crazy man's agenda pushing that discovery forward).  It is possible his discovery is fabricated. . . maybe not.  But Mr. Peter the Mayor pushes his own report through the paper, which doesn't just discredit Stockman, but also conforms reality to his idea of what the Baths should be.  And this reminds me of a book I'm reading called, "Reading Lolita in Tehran," when the narrator discusses Nabokov's novels and how "there was always the shadow of another world, one that was only attainable through fiction." She talks about Humbert and other men in her life who have tried to "shape others according to their own dreams and desires."  Humbert is all imagination and craft.  He reinvents Lolita's history and person to suit him.  He creates, but he also imposes.  I feel like Peter Mayor is like him in that respect.  He can calm the storm of people and channel it to do his will.  But I'm not sure that the play is a celebration of man-made power over scientific discovery.

I think Dr. Stockman is the protagonist, because he is the true man of science trying to make his crazy discoveries heard.  He's the underdog. He's like the time traveling scientist in Kate and Leopold.  "It is no more crazy than a dog finding a rainbow. Dogs are colourblind, Gretchen. They don't see colour. Just like we don't see time. We can feel it, we can feel it passing, but we can't see it. . . .And that's it; it's that simple. That's all I discovered. I'm just a... a guy who saw a crack in a chair that no one else could see. I'm that dog who saw a rainbow, only none of the other dogs believed me."

There is a connection of science and what's going on, there is some kind of relationship between discovery and creation, but I'm still not sure how Ibsen's bacteria observation skills are evident in his method. 

*Disclaimer-- I have never read Lolita, just Reading Lolita in Tehran. 

Peeling the Onion, trolls are a lot like ogres

"Or two identical onions?  But you can peel them, layer after layer, down to the centre, down t the juicy quick, and, just as you tear into that, and the last bit of onion-juice stains your fingers, they resemble each other-- enough." pg 105

When I first read this, I thought, "Ah, I guess we are not all exactly the same soul-wise, but we are similar in nature, but we are all shrouded in the same kind of complex layers."  And then I thought of Shrek, especially as Ibsen's portions of the Biographer's Tale are peppered with troll references.  (I guess trolls are similar to ogres, but they tend to be more aggressive and territorial- says Wikipedia and fairy tales).  I think both points- onions and trolls- have something to do with how Ibsen lives as a scientist/ observer.

Onions testify to Ibsen's more scientific nature.  He wants to observe every aspect of human nature, but so much occurs internally.  He can't watch the brain and the soul at work.  He needs to peel the physical layers away to peer "doubtless into the cavern of the skull.  The scalp and the features were rolled back like the skin of an onion" (170).  On that level, people are not what we think are people.  Instead they are simply objects (things, I guess), which Ibsen can break open to see the source of imagination and thinking.  "SP: But, my dear sir, consider.  It's to your advantage.  I'll open you up and let in the light.  I want to discover the source of your dreams.  I want to find out how you're put together. pg 176."  I'm not sure Ibsen is truly thinking of breaking human skulls apart (or waiting for them to fall apart) in order to have a looksy into the mind, but he does mean to delve deeper to go beyond the "Stranger on a Train" acquaintance with his characters.  He has to piece together their psyches with as much precision and care as a clockmaker, which means he has to fully comprehend each part and how it functions (very scientific of him).

But then comes in the trolls.  I think it is interesting that he incorporates the fairytale myth of the troll, because he sees the troll in himself.  I looked up "troll" at http://www.mythicalcreaturesguide.com and got this definition: A troll is a fearsome member of a mythical anthropomorph race from Scandinavia, mostly Norway. Their role ranges from fiendish giants – similar to the ogres of England – to a devious, more human-like folk of the wilderness, living underground in hills, caves or mounds.depending on the type of troll (forest or mountain), the forest sometimes likes to hide or hybernate in deep springs or rivers. The mountain troll mostly likes to house in mounds or hills.

The way Ibsen talks about trolls in the BT makes me wonder why he sees the creature in his soul as well as in his face.  "To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul" (94).  I'm just not sure what he means by this.  In some ways, he keeps his troll hidden from the world and only brings him out to write, to order/scientifically observe and dissect the people around him.  It implies a deviousness in his methodical procedures.  Later on in the chapter though, he talks about how he always keeps his troll hidden, to "keep it locked up inside, and that is why we sometimes seem to stand as if we were observing each other at a distance" (101).  So, maybe he lets his inner troll, the impish aspect of his soul, control how he portrays his scientific observations, but he doesn't want anyone to know it is there, giving the subject the illusion that he is cold and detached? 
He is tricky.

Reflection on Thursday's class/other stuff

Creation and order.  When we create, do we do so within the confines of an order or is the thing we create order itself?  I have been mulling over our mantra, “To impose is not to discover,” while I have been reading, and an idea keeps flitting into my face and darting away again.  “To impose is not to discover.” Linnaeus is the father of taxonomy, founder of binomial nomenclature, a naming system.  Genus and species, both rooted in Latin grammar, but can take on roots from other words.  On one hand, I like to think he took as much care to name plants as Vera and S-DS did.  On the other, he named a useless European plant, “Siegesbeckia,” after a critic he didn’t like (Father of Taxonomy).  I think that’s a little petty.  

“Nature is God’s law, placed in all things during creation, according to which they multiply, sustain, and destroy themselves.”  (Linnaeus).  Here, Linnaeus describes the “economy of nature,” the cycle of how the natural world runs and he attributes it to God, since God was and is often thought of as the ultimate creator, but I wonder if Linnaeus “discovered” God’s natural order or did he create it and become a god himself?  His “discoveries” seemed to fit in like the right numbers in a Sudoku puzzle.  Everything has its “place in the divinely ordered creation” (Linnaeus).  But is he just imposing all of nature into a form he created, which he says God created, because it makes sense to him?  And is that bad. . . 

I thought the singer from “the Idea of Order at Key West” was the one, who created the sea and made it “whatever self it had, became the self,” but she’s actually the one creating order, turning the “meaningless plungings of water and the wind” into something meaningful.  She’s taking chaos, things that exist and transforming them.  But discovery and creation. . . .

“To impose is not to discover.”  I feel like creation is an imposition.  When we create, we are making an order.  We are imposing, creating boundaries, “demarcations.”  We are mushing and mashing all the stones and dirt around us into something we can understand, but maybe the order we create isn’t what they are supposed to be.  We’ve “given” them meaning, like the Muslims gave meaning to the Mecca Stone.  But maybe the real meaning is that a stone is a stone and wants to speak for itself. Maybe its name isn’t really a stone.  The tragedy of that situation is that it can’t speak and tell us.  (Ironically, I’ve heard that my Korean name, “Hyun,”- means stone, but I’m always talking).     

Which brings me to the Doll House.  I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but both husband and wife created a world (an order) they thought they wanted.  They imposed a lifestyle upon themselves and played along, because they knew it was just pretend, but that pretend was ordered around societal rules and games and it gave their lives purpose.  When the order disintegrated, their lives simultaneously lost meaning but had the potential to have greater meaning. I think they both felt it, they knew it was “wonderful,” but couldn’t see it or figure it out yet.  I don’t know how they’d know that.  I felt though, that Nora was on the path of discovery by breaking down the order she created. 

I have no idea where that leaves us or what we are trying to do.  “To impose is not to discover.”  “To order is not to discover?”  Or maybe not?  Maybe?  Probably not.  For the record, I’m okay with some impositions, because I want to absorb and organize information somehow, but I’m also okay with breaking some stuff to look at something in a fresh way, before I try to make sense of it again.  I’m down. 

“Father of Taxonomy.” September 18, 2011.  http://www.ucmp.berkley.edu/history/linnaeus.html

“Linnaeus, physicotheology, and protoecology.” September 18, 2011. http://www.linnaeus.uu.se/online/eco/fy_teologi.html

Facts, Lies and Mosaics

When browsing through the section regarding S DS "The Art of Biography," I thought the stressed point was to report only the facts we can verify. Only report the truth. In his scenario, he states explicitly that a biographer "must never claim knowledge that he doesn't know." But his earlier notes seem contradictory. "First find your facts./ Select your facts. (What to include, what to omit)./ Arrange your facts./ Consider missing facts. . . This leads to the vexed question of speculation. Does it have any place, and if it does, on what basis" (pg 32). His "how to write biography" checklist indicates that it is an art. He is tailoring bits of information and then perhaps altering other bits to fit the picture he wishes to make. I didn't catch that the first time around, but now that I see it, I think I understand why he fabricated some of his writings about Linneaus, Galton and Ibsen. He took the facts he gathered and assembled them into lives that seem reasonable and true. I guess he knew those men so well, or felt that he knew them so well, he could give them a new order in their lives, rearranging the tesserae in their mosaics. What I'm trying to say is that he was a liar, but a good one. It seems that his well crafted lies just reordered what we know as life. It's an art, which reveals some truth (I think) of the speaker and maybe some truth of the subject.  The events seem to be in chaos, but the essence is there even though that essence is malleable.  If that makes sense.

I was at Hike and Read this weekend with a bunch of freshmen, and we were talking about the Picture of Dorian Gray. "Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life." I brought that point up, and they didn't know what to think. They thought of Descartes, and that kind of made everyone's heads hurt. "Is this really a marker?" "Is that a lake?" Signifier and Signified stuff. But that made me think that if language (the spoken word) is an art, maybe the words we speak out causes the things around us to mold to that meaning. The word I say and how I say it and where I say it and to whom reorganizes the thing into something understandable.. The kids I nanny-ed for this summer loved to hear stories, but I ran out of fairy tales after a couple of weeks and turned to Greek myths and older, maybe not so appropriate stories. I started telling them about Beowulf, and I modified it for four year old ears. It wasn't the "true" story, but I like the way I re-told it. It's like a game of telephone when you pass down stories. We don't remember or we don't hear or understand all of it, so we fill in the details, reorganizing the tale into a new entity. The truth adapted to the situation.  I am a liar.

I saw this video in an Origins class I took a few years ago about the world being created. This is what I thought about when Shelby read the first part of Genesis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9lwvI45TsM

He's real and solid, but we still don't know the guy?

“Nanson thus discovers that “things and facts” can only come from within, and that his search for knowledge of a concrete nature has ultimately led to his own self.” Reading this line from James’ blog, I thought about the “Idea of Order at Key West.” I was thinking how disconnected (disembodied) Nanson is at the beginning of the book. I think he is that way, because his mind is stuck in abstract, bodiless theories (like Lacan). He doesn’t know how to live, but he knows how to think about living. That changes when he changes to facts, to words.

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

The more words he gets out, the more solid he becomes, the more he reveals his identity. I think we talked a little bit about that in class, but I cannot remember if we talked about how Nanson (even though a lot of the book is about his scholarly search and not so scholarly adventures) doesn’t really show much of who he is. I am still re-reading the beginning, but it just occurred to me that, like DS, Nanson is revealing bits of himself but not who he is. Here’s what I know (or remember at this point) of Nanson:
- He is a little man “small but perfectly formed” pg 6
- His family name is Latin for dwarf (funny) pg 6
- His mom is dead pg 3
- His dad disappeared pg 6
- He used to live in a red brick “box” pg 39
- He slept with (at least) two women in his life
- He was sexually harassed by a creeper
- He can be animalistic pg 236
This narrative might have included many “I”s (Nanson), but I don’t know that I know him much more than that. I guess Breanna has got a point when she says that, “there is no end in the acquirement of knowledge, just as it is impossible to fully know and understand one’s true self”

Immediate reflections/thoughts on Byatt's book. Muhr.

The most intriguing mysteries are often the ones, which really don’t offer the one word answers we often seek. After finishing Byatt’s book, I felt stuck in a kind of spiral, cycle: mystery, sight of truth, truth present (for maybe a second) then separation or absence from truth back to mystery. It reminded me of an awful Chutes and Ladders game I played once (I haven’t really played since), where I never reached the end, but got close each time only to fall back to the beginning.
Nanson is revolving around the mystery or his own identity during the whole book. He searches for purpose and meaning, without even knowing it, by investigating the life of D-S. He’s doing a Lacan, learning how and what he wants by “identifying” with the desires of others. Or maybe not identifying as much as consuming.
I got a strong vibe of a kind of cannibalism in this book. Everything related to D-S had been eaten up. “Holme and Holly had been subsumed into Deodar Books, which had been swallowed by Hachs &Shaw.” And then Nanson’s research leads him to look through D-S into the lives of four men. D-S had basically finished with Bole’s life, and Nanson’s interest is piqued by his consumption of Bole’s life and D-S’s self in telling that life. Nanson has eaten some forbidden fruit in a way and can’t seem to stop gobbling down other people’s lives in pursuit of D-S’. What he doesn’t realize is that D-S does not have an identity. I think it is Lacan again when we are talking about amorphous souls? I don’t remember. But D-S’ identity is especially hard to pin down, because he is also an addict of consuming other peoples’ lives, which are also changing shapes. So, Nanson moves around, not knowing where he is going. He sees a lead, which takes him down a path he doesn’t expect, but it gives him a discovery. But that discovery is only a small part of the overall “truth” he is looking for, and then he drifts back to where he started.
Shape shifting moves me along to names. “Naming is a difficult art” (62). Naming is my mystery, I think. I felt something click when I read that “(Vera) said it was not arbitrary, each marble had been carefully and uniquely named.” I think it must be an art of sorts to be able to look at something and just instinctively know what its core being is. Like people’s names. Sometimes, I look at someone, and I know she must be named, “Hailey.” She just looks like one, but instead, I find out her name is Allison. Names carry a lot of weight in most cultures (probably all). I cannot decide if they are important because they reveal something of our identities or if we have given them meaning with language, but that train of thought takes me to lists.
Lists seem important in this text, and others, because they are names of things, and this book (and this class) seems to be stuck on “things.” “Do you think everyone collects things when little?” (246). We must have had an easier time understanding these kind of mysteries when we were younger, because I used to do tons of things, I don’t get know. I made lists: to-do lists inspired by Toad and Frog, lists of things I wanted, lists of favorite things, lists of friends. I named things and would line them up/order them. My favorites would be closest to my head at night, while the least favored were nearer to my feet and more likely to get kicked off. Harold, Butterscotch, Beth, Penny, Kitty, Bride and Groom bears (I wasn’t too imaginative when I inherited those), Arwen, Chocolate, Chewy and Pinky Mouse. I did this almost every night. I read names out of a phone book once for kicks and giggles. My best friend and I were bored, talking on the telephone. We were probably 9, waiting for parents to come home. I forget who, but one of us pulled out the phone book and started to read names. We made it a game to find the most ridiculous, hardest to pronounce names to say. Simpler times, I guess. I think the name game, lists are bridges, synapses in our brain, to not only make us aware of all the “things” that exist or did exist, but also how we can make sense of it all in an order. They are witnesses to forgotten things we sometimes always forget and then come back to. I think.