Not an Ending

Before this class, my idea of mythology was typically of the Greek gods and stories that I had heard and learned in several high school class so I generally expected this same sort of thing from this class.  I was surprised that that wasn't at all what I've taken from this.  While I still love Greek Mythology and will probably strive to do more research on it and learn more of the history behind it, I have learned to appreciate mythology in a much broader sense.  This class has taught me a lot about myself.  As many have pointed out, Ovid knows more about their lives than they do themselves, I would tend to disagree.  I feel that Ovid has taught me that I have access to my life in ways that I hadn't realized before.  I know go through my days with open eyes and notice things I hadn't before.  I have learned that no day is ordinary if you simply realize that every day is a gift and we are lucky to be able to experience the pieces of events that help shape the entire story that we are all apart of.  Our days will continue on after this class, and we will draw closer and closer to the ending of our roles within this never ending story.

Original and Ordinary

I've been thinking a lot about how throughout this class we have constantly been mentioning two things.  The first being that nothing is original.  And the second is our assignment to have an ordinary day.  While I understand that everything has already been done before I have trouble fully accepting this concept.  We are constantly discovering things that are "new" and finding different ways to do things.  If everything has been done before than how are we able to discover these things? Wouldn't we have a cure for cancer?  Shouldn't the world be at peace with one another? None of these things are true, so therefore I have to believe that some things haven't been done before.  Or maybe this is more of a matter of the fact that they haven't been done by us at this time.  As we go through our lives we are constantly learning and making our own discoveries.  I think this means be are doing something original, but it is something original to us personally.  This also leads directly to our assignment to have an ordinary day.  As soon as we were given this assignment, everyone started to notice things that happened throughout their day that they didn't think was so ordinary.  I personally think the true aspect of this assignment was to stop going through the motions of everyday life, and actually live.  This simple task caused all of us to pay attention to our lives! Unordinary things happen to us constantly! But we will never notice them if we don't slow down and take the time to fully live and appreciate our lives.

My Life as a Mythic Detective

When we were first given this assignment, I thought about how I’ve seen so many connections with art and mythology in my life.  I originally came to school to be an architect because I knew that I wanted to do something creative with my life and this would allow me to do that but not live the life of a struggling artist.  But as I explored this field and partook in classes, I realized that if I was an architect I was never going to be given the opportunity to design the things I loved.  I enjoyed creating organic, curved, structures out of expensive materials which is extremely unpractical for what is needed in the world.  I also realized that I would always be designing for someone else, and following their requirements so this took away my creative freedom.  As a result, I realized I needed to stick with an art field that gives me the freedom in life that I’d been striving for so I switched to graphic design.  Some of the core classes for this major include several art history classes.  I took my first one this semester, simultaneously with mythologies.  As I’ve read Ovid’s Metamorphosis and learned the history of art, I have realized that they are directly related.  So many famous art pieces have portrayed mythological themes such as Peter Brueghel’s, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  This coincides with the story of Daedalus and Icarus in Book 8.  I’ve placed this picture on the following page as a reference.  The artist took details from Ovid such as the farmer at his plow, the shepherd leaning on his staff, the fisherman down by the water, but none of these figures seem to notice the subtle inclusion of Icarus falling into the water.  I love this story because it shows that we aren’t always as ready for certain tasks as we think we are, and patience is essential when growing up.

I was planning on listing many more of these images, as there are probably thousands that have been done over time referencing Metamorphosis but I think this would end up being a lengthy list so instead I thought about breaking my own life down and pointing out key moments that have shaped my mythological journey as I’ve grown up.

There is always a beginning, a middle and an end, however when I tell my mythological story, it won’t have an end because I am still on my journey.  I will of course start at the beginning.  I was born in Baltimore, Maryland and was an extremely colicky baby.  I was extremely cute of course but I wasn’t one of those babies that liked to cuddle with her parents.  I wanted to sleep but never really could and gave my parents a pretty hard time at first.  After a few years they figured they would have another baby because it couldn’t get much worse after me.  We moved to Helena where my sister was born which is the primary location of my mythological life.  When my sister was born I was no longer the center of my parents world, I had to share their attention.  This is always a struggle for many people.  As humans we want as much attention as we can possibly get, it’s just in our nature.  As toddlers, we think the world strictly revolves around us.  If we cover our eyes and can’t see, than that means that no one else can possibly see either.  We are self-involved and don’t move past this until later on in life.  I started taking ballet lessons when I was four, then my sister started these as well.  I joined a soccer team so my sister decided she wanted to play soccer.  I loved to paint so my sister wanted to paint.  I started racing dragsters with my dad, so my sister started racing as well.  I quit ballet when I got into high school and joined the cheer team.  Guess what?  My sister did this as well.  When I was young I began to resent this as I started to notice the reoccurring trend.  She was always doing what I was doing which created a competition between us.  I’m sure participating in the same activities was easier on my parents because they could take us to the same locations and not be constantly running around, but I initially hated how much she copied me!  I always fought with my mom about this because the copying was so frustrating; especially if she beat me in one of our drag races.  My parents would always tell me that I should be flattered that my little sister wanted to do everything that I did because it meant she wanted to be like me, but I always had trouble seeing things that way.  Then as I started to mature and somewhat grow up in high school, I started to realize that she really did admire me, and that I should be honored by this.

As we grew up, my sister started to get intense pains beginning in her knees.  We took her to the doctor several times and were always told it was tendonitis or growing pains and that it would subside when she had fully grown.  When she got into high school and finished growing the pain started to get worse and spread.  She now had shooting pain starting in her lower back that went down her legs and later spread to her arms.  These developments really increased when I went away to college.  My mom traveled around to different hospitals with her to try and help her because she could no longer sit down for an extended period of time.  Doctors had prescribed her with a ton of different kinds of medication that no child should ever have to deal with.  She then had doctors tell her that the pain was just in her head and that she was faking it because they had run so many tests and simply didn’t want to try anything else.  This caused my sister to lose a lot of faith because she knew that it was real and having professionals tell her she was basically crazy seemed unbearable and she wanted to give up.  Thank goodness my mom never let her.  Finally this last winter break she was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease, spondylo arthritis, piriformis syndrome, and fibromyalgia.  She has started physical therapy for it and it is finally starting to improve. 

Finally, let’s get back to mythology.  The beginning of this story started with my parents having a colicky baby in Baltimore, Maryland.  As when we are children and think everyone’s world revolves around us, I thought my story would primarily be about me and my life; but as I have matured and grown up, moving to the middle of my story, it has become about my life with my sister.  She is my very best friend in the world and I am now honored that she wanted to be like me even throughout all of the struggles she has gone through in her life.  I know that it doesn’t matter what I do with my life, people are what matter so I always want to surround myself with these opportunities.  Overall, I have no idea what my mythological ending will be, but I know I want it to no longer just involve myself.  As a mythological detective I am striving to think more selflessly and have realized that everything has come from something else and we all need people and past knowledge to survive. 

Circles

I've been thinking about my life as a mythic detective and one thing that has really stood out to me and continuous reoccurs throughout my day would be the concept of a circle.  On Friday our professor mentioned, "There's no such thing as an ending, there is just a new beginning."  This directly relates to the concept of a circle which I think leads to the concept of origins.  Even if we think we are being "original" and starting something new, there is a very good chance that someone else has already done it before.  What goes around comes around and we are always repeating ourselves. 
I am in a drawing class where we are working on a capstone project for the end of the year where we were assigned to complete three drawings on anything we have observed.  I was recently in Oahu and was going through several of the pictures I had taken at Pearl Harbor and decided to focus my capstone project on the wars of our world.  My first piece is focusing on WWII and includes a series of images that overlap each other.  My second piece includes the Iraq war images, and the third is a futuristic possible war with North Korea.  A common element I am using within all of these pieces is a clock to record time.  As the clock has evolved from the old fashioned roman numeral to today digital, our weapons and technology have evolved with this as well.  One thing I am hoping to put across with these images is the fact that we are constantly going in circles as a clock does.  We are making the same general mistakes in war and always starting another leading me back to my point that nothing is original, within both our mistakes and our ideas.  Are we truly evolving as a society? Or are we always going to make the same mistakes since nothing is ever really new?

Tabula Rasa

I was looking through my notes and working on my mythic detective presentation when I came across the phrase "tabula rasa".  I looked up information on this and the first Wikipedia definition says, Tabula rasa, meaning blank slate in Latin, is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception.  I can see both sides of this argument and am sort of torn between what I think I believe personally.  The idea that we are all born with a clean slate is comforting because it allows us to have so many possibilities, to learn endlessly, to be whoever we want to be.  This can also be scary because we are placed in the hands of two or sometimes one person as our guide and to start shaping what we will know and who we will be.  At the same time how can we be born with absolutely no knowledge at all.  That seems like such a hard thing to comprehend.  How can we learn anything if we didn't already know how to do the simple act of learning itself?  We are made up of many parts and those parts know how to function to make us exist, therefore, don't we already know something? Like how to live?  This is a topic I feel I could debate endlessly.

Questions and Knowledge

A lot of different things really struck out to me while listening to Fredrick Turners lecture on Friday.  One of them was when he briefly said, "Maybe knowledge has something to do with death." When he said this it was very quick and almost as if it were a simple thought in his mind, however it was extremely interesting to me and got me really thinking.  As we further develop in our society we gain knowledge.  This has lead to technological advancements.  We know live in houses instead of caves.  We use cell phones constantly instead of strictly face to face interaction.  We have developed ways to destroy each other.  As we grow older as a society, our advancements will continue to expand.  Will this come to a point where eventually our knowledge is so great that some day we might be able to prevent death and save our societies so we can live forever? Or will we end up destroying each other before we gain the technology to solve things such as a cure for cancer?  As we obtain more knowledge we also gain one vital attribute; questions. I'm encouraged to keep asking questions throughout my life because this will always lead to more knowledge.  Just a few thoughts on my mind.

Speakers

When we were assigned to attend the author talk last night at the Museum of the Rockies, at first I thought about all of the things I had to get done that night and started stressing out when adding another item to that list.  Then I thought about how enthusiastic and excited our professor was about the speaker we'd be listening to.  I realized that this was something that I needed to attend and keep an open mind about.  It turned out to be an extremely rewarding experience.  Fredrick Turner is passionate about his writing and it came across immediately when he walked onto the stage.  While listening to him read some of his works you can't help but feel like you are within the stories he reads.  He captured feelings and emotions in his words that were filled throughout the room.  I am very glad I attended this lecture and look forward to other talks that I attend outside of my classes in the future.