Walt Whitman Connection

I do find this poem interesting, not because of the many details that Whitman includes to broaden the scene (I, myself, find that repetition tedious) but because of the main idea of the poem. Whitman says that whatever the boy in his poem looks at, he becomes. At first this sounds pretty odd, but as Whitman continues with this idea, it starts to make sense. A lot of who we are can be attributed to our environment. Therefore, the things around us do change us, at least to a certain extent.

Whitman especially makes this clear when speaking of the boy's parents. The boy gleans all of his outward personality from his parents because he's around them the most.

There was one line that I did connect with in particular:

"...the sense of what is real, the
thought if after all it should prove unreal..."

I have spent a good deal of my thought life wondering the same question. To see it referenced really did touch me, I guess. Most people take what they see in their day-to-day lives for what it appears to be, on the whole. This is necessary, or they could not function in our world (for example, if you wander around trying to prove the world to be real, and not working or something, you could lose your job. If you question whether your food is poisoned at every meal, you may never eat at all). However, I think many people don't even recognize the possibility of our world being illusion, since it's so rarely referred to outside of philosophy and sometimes poetry. I think it's refreshing that Whitman did recognize this--although I'm a bit puzzled as to how it fits into the poem's context.

I guess Whitman is trying to speak for all people, again, and assumes that everyone questions reality at some point in their lives, which for all I know is true. It would make sense.

Emily Dickinson Poem

THE BUTTERFLY’S assumption-gown,
In chrysoprase apartments hung,
This afternoon put on.
How condescending to descend,
And be of buttercups the friend
In a New England town!

I think Emily Dickinson is trying to show people the everyday beauty and regality of nature. She personifies the butterfly and describes its usual living place (using words like "chrysoprase," which is a kind of gem. Instead of treating living among humans as an honour, as people self-centeredly would like to, she says that it's "condescending" for the butterfly to dwell among us. She treats the butterfly, whom some would consider a mere insect or even a pest, as a symbol of beauty and richness that is even more valuable than the people living in the town.

Anti/Transcendental Writers

I prefer the anti-transcendental writers. From what we've read of them, not only do I enjoy their writing more in general, I think they're more realistic than the transcendental writers, on the whole. The transcendentalists seem really idealistic to me. I know that people are sometimes killed by nature, as they are in "developed" areas as well--but therefore, nature is not always good. It sometimes is survival of the fittest. Nature isn't a clean, well-kept-up park--it's a home for predators and prey alike.

People, likewise, are not always good. Some people may argue that humans are good at their core, but I don't think most people would disagree with me when I say that sometimes people do do bad things. Humans can be as dangerous as nature is, if not more dangerous.

The last transcendental belief, that the truth can always be found, doesn't always hold up either. True, the Bible says that all of our works will someday be revealed--but I don't think that's what the transcendentalists mean. Even if it is, then the transcendentalists are one for three.

And there are plenty of unsolved mysteries in the world that we, as individuals, may die before understanding.

Thus, in my mind, the anti-transcendentalists are more often accurate.

Team Poe

...because he'd be so much better with Bella than Irving could ever be.

Lame and obvious joking aside, I'm firmly a Poe fan. Irving's work doesn't strike me as that enjoyable to read, to me personally of course. Poe, though, is deep, and (as we discussed in class) uses a lot of awesome language. I love his poetry especially. There was a time when I tried to memorize "The Raven" (and I have successfully memorized most of it, haha), and of course there's my favorite Poe poem, "A Dream Within a Dream." For those of you unfamiliar with it, it goes:

Take this kiss upon the brow
And, in parting from you now,
This much let me avow:
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream
Yet, if hope has flown away
In a night or in a day,
In a vision or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand.
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep
While I weep!--while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

(Any errors in the above should be attributed to my faulty memory, but otherwise I guess you'll just have to trust me that I didn't look this one up.)

"A Dream Within a Dream" is one of Poe's lesser-known works, but I find it resonated with me a lot. I love the rhyme and the subject, the language and the imagery, the metaphors and the emotion in it. And I suppose that's what I love about Poe's work the most. He writes creepiness really well, but he recognizes beauty within his works also.

Charlie Chaplin and the Communist Party

Charlie Chapman was a popular movie-writer and actor who first became famous in 1915. His specialty was comedies and social commentaries. He was really popular in the United States until 1940, when he made a film called "The Great Dictator" that ended with a call for Americans to rally against Hitler and the Nazis. America, at the time, was strongly anti-war, so Chapman already had points counting against him there.

The thing that really condemned him was his later full-fledged supported the Soviet Union; 1942 articles written by columnist Westbrook Pegler accused Chapman of being a Communist sympathizer and, what was worse for his reputation, an immoral womanizer. The second count actually did the most damage to his reputation in the eyes of most Americans. He was eventually accused of all sorts of crimes of both illegal and immoral nature--fathering a child of an unmarried woman; owning white slaves; and, of course, being a Communist. He was innocent of all of these despite his pro-Soviet leanings (he was not a member of the Communist Party but was never allowed to testify on his own behalf when he was taken to court about it), and he eventually ended up leaving the country to live in Switzerland by 1953 to escape the intense political persecution.

To be honest, the things that most strike me about this article are the similarities between the political journalists (Pegler, as mentioned above, but also a "Hollywood columnis[t]" named Hedda Hopper) and the fictional journalist Rita Skeeter from the Harry Potter series. In the books, Skeeter was a clear villain--a journalist whose main goal it was to go after any and all scandals, regardless of their truth, as long as they sold newspapers. She was (as her name suggests) like a mosquito or a leech--sucking the juicy rumors out of the truth and publishing them for her own means. Pegler and Hopper may not have been villains, but journalists who are in business for the money and drama of stories, instead of for the truth, are like villains to their victims. Reading this article made me think more about the bias of the media and whether they should publish personal things about celebrities, as they make a habit of doing. I've heard that "the people have a right to know," but do they really? So what if Chapman really was a Communist sympathizer? He did have influence over American media, but by persecuting him as the legal authorities did, the American right of free speech was violated. That moral compromise probably did more harm for the nation than Chapman would ever have done.

Source: "What Made Charlie Run?" Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1989. By Stephen M. Weissman, MD. http://www1.american.edu/academic.depts/soc/run.html

The Crucible Act I Reflection

I like this play, The Crucible, so far from what we've read about it. The Salem witch trials have always frightened me, but this is giving us a chance to look at the individual members' psychology in addition to seeing the acts of Salem as a whole. In particular, I wonder about the mentality of the little girls who claim to have seen the witches. In modern-day interrogations, it has been shown that children can be highly suggestible when giving testimony.

Contemporary "witchhunts" take the form of accusations of things like child molesting, which (like witchcraft in Salem) often has little evidence outside of witness accounts. Psychologists who press children for testimony with leading questions like "Did so-and-so do THIS to you?" tend to result in the mental phenomenon known as false memories--a child wants to please the questioner and thus convinces him/herself that whatever he/she is being asked about really did happen. When pressed for details, the child will search his/her mind until they "remember" things that in actuality did not happen. Once he/she have said that it is true, though, the child stands by his/her decision (for the child does not want to believe him/herself a liar) even in court. And who would disbelieve the testimony of an innocent child who has even convinced him/herself that what he/she is saying is true? In this way, guiltless adults can be convicted of unfathomably terrible crimes that they under no circumstances would commit.

I believe that this is what was happening to many of the child witnesses in Salem, at least in the play.

Another person involved whom I am interested in is Tituba. She comes under fire from all sides but is shown a way out through accusing other people. I don't think we can justifiably blame her, at least in the way we would blame an evil villain in a story. Her motives are sympathetic at least--she's a victim who's scared out of her mind and says whatever she can to keep herself away from the noose of Salem's "justice." Of course what she did was wrong, but she didn't have a lot of time to think about what she was doing--she reacted in the middle of a swirl of terror and panic. Once again the idea of leading questions comes into play--the people she eventually accused were the ones her interrogators suggested for her.

All in all, I think that the play so far is very interesting in terms of mob psychology (as discussed in class) as well as that of the individuals involved.

As I walk in a pitch-black Night

(A poem--written in the Puritan style of Anne Bradstreet.)

The eve tonight is cold and dark
The only thing that bids me hark
Are crickets singing in the grass
As if lamenting, "Ah, alas--
"The sun is gone, the night to stay
"'Til dawn shall break another day."

No moon lights up the cloudy sky
No twinkling stars to nav'gate by
I see no path beneath my feet
And so I wander off the street
Until my neighbor's light I spy
And find my way with now-keen eye

The neighbors ours, they walk alone
No stepping-path to them is shown
It is our duty and our joy
To those in the world's grim employ
To show them truth and light their way
'Til their dark night turn into day.