Heidegger- Dwelling Dwelling Dwelling

Besides cringing everytime the word "dwelling" was used by the end of this article, I thought overall it was pretty interesting. I think what I liked the best was how he used the old languages to define what dwelling actually was. I thought the definition of "to dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in it's nature" allowed me to have a better time grasping the idea of building-buildings he was talking about in the previous paragraph. I really liked the idea that in order to consider something a dwelling, it has to be a place of peace that spares a person, but not in a negative way. Unfortunately, in the real world I feel like that would severely cut down on what people would actually consider "dwellings" because I'm pretty sure peace is a rare thing now-a-days, but the idea is a nice and I like it.

What kind of annoyed me was the idea of the fourness thing. When he first started talking about it, I thought he was talking about this dandy picture here
which it's kind of a spin-off of. But the thing I had a real problem with was a)his obnoxious repetition of the phrase "we are already thinking of the other three along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four." I actually recited that from memory so what does that tell you? But when I was thinking about these four "elements", I didn't have trouble separating them in my mind. Earth is the ground, the plants, and the animals and that's it. The sky is the sky and the clouds and all the shit that goes on in them. And mortals are people. Personally my own beliefs kind of mess up his theory about the divinities but if I just went on where he's coming from, it basically the idea of God, which to me would be the only thing capable of messing up the separateness (depending on your own beliefs) because of the idea that "god is everywhere"..or whatever. I just thought that the way he was writing it was almost condescending, like the readers couldn't possibly imagine a world where these "elements" were separated in them. But I did like his explanation about how mortals dwell in each of them, I thought that was interesting.

Stage Space in King Lear

Okay so I thought I posted last night but apparently my computer decided to suck big time so here we go again..


One of the first points made in the article was one of the ones I liked the most. I thought the idea that the stage actually took away from King Lear's greatness was interesting and I thought it was similar to the criticisms of a lot of movie adaptations. Like when you read a book your imagination creates the characters, the inflection in the lines they say and the entire situation, but when you watch the movie all of these are given to the audience and you're forced to accept or reject, but never to create your own. It becomes too hard to disassociate from the visuals presented. When the article said "The stage's insufficiency derives from its particularity, its rootedness in a precise time and place" that's what i was reminded of.

I also thought the idea that the mind can't really see space in its entirety, but instead simply sees objects was really different and I had never thought about it like that before, but I agree. When it talked about "the simplest experiment is enough to demonstrate that our view can perceive only objects in a spatial field
and not the spatial field itself, unless that field is understood as the effect of
particular objects grouped in a particular way and especially if those objects
are grouped according to principles that emphasize interrelatedness" that was when I realized that although it is weird to think about, it's true. You don't notice space, you notice the things in the space, and only when something is changed do you really take notice of it at all. It kind of reminded me of another reading we did, I forget which one, that talked about how humans absolutely have to organize and categorize things. In this case, the idea of space is abstract, so people have to focus on objects in order to find someway to placate themselves. Like toward then end when it says: "the divisions sutured this "literary" structure to a concept of "place," which rendered the play's action comprehensible and made possible a final aesthetic judgment" once again it comes back to the need to make it comprehensible, to make it conform and fit into something solid, pull it away from something abstract.

King Lear

I know those are kind of lame, but they made me chuckle for a minute.
Anyways....

In Huizinga's article, I thought the idea of a secret place, specifically when it said "they players withdraw into an alternative place that is separate from the ordinary world" was pretty cool, kind of like the stage transforms into another plane of existence while you're watching it, and the audience transports with it to this secret place nobody else in the world can appreciate or be apart of. When reading King Lear, I was imagining it being performed on stage and it kind of expanding to encompass all the different lands and places the first two Acts require. It probably sounds kind of trippy but I guess it also kind of goes along with when Huizinga talks about "all are temporary worlds within the ordinary world" like the stage becomes it's own parallel dimension only as long as the play is going on, and as King Lear goes from one daughter to the next the stage and space expands and transforms to fit the needs of the play. I don't know I may sound completely ridiculous but that's what I imagined when I ready the article and the play.

Movie Clips

okay so I can't figure out how to make it a fucking link and it's really annoying me so I'm just going to put the addresses and hope that it works. Sorry I'm blogging-impaired.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4YElwgUqk4 these are the first monsters the main character meets when the bells ring and she enters the "darkness"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXvcTh83bfQ&feature=related
the music for this one is pretty lame but it shows much better the actual hell that they're stuck in

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5mT5LhbRJw
this is just the trailer


When we were talking about movies that portrayed hell, as soon as I was leaving this movie popped into my head. The main character ends up in a sort of parallel dimension where she wanders around and every once in a while a bell rings and the "darkness" aka demons and all sorts of scary fucked up looking creatures emerge and kill anyone they come upon. I thought it was interesting because the town the main character is trapped in, Silent Hill, was in another dimension, but still existed in the real world. I guess it was kind of a purgatory, and only when a bell rang did the devil and everything come out and search for the people stuck in it.

Dante and Wertheim

I thought that in Canto XVIII, when it was describing the ditches or whatever it was around Malebolge made a really interesting picture in my mind. When it says: 'the belt which this leaves therefore forms a circle/between the well and the high, difficult bank/ and the bottom of it has ten distinct valleys/ Well, in order to guard the walls/ ditch after ditch is dug around a castle/ the ground acquires a characteristic formation/ so was the appearance of the valleys here' in lines 7-13, for some reason I had a hard time at first visualizing it. I think maybe it's because I pictured hell like the drawing, with nothingness in the middle and the fact that these ditches (and I'm picturing the trenches soldiers fight in for some reason) are surrounding something makes me believe it should be the bottom of hell where they're located. I thought that was a pretty interesting idea, like maybe as Dante and Virgil go through each circle they expand, kind of like opening a bureau? I have no idea and I may completely be talking through my ass but I thought it was a kind of cool idea.

Also, from the Wertheim reading, I really liked how she talked about how stories create alternaive spaces, and even though Dante's world was one of demons and angels, that it wasn't an alternative space because in that time period, with their faith, this world was a "reality" for them. I thought the idea that "Rather than enticing us into an escape from reality, Dante invites us to see it whole, in all its vast dualistic scope," (6) was really interesting as well.

The Sacred and the Profane

I'm not completely sure what we're suppose to do on this blog so here goes..

After reading The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade, there were a couple things I thought were pretty interesting but more things she/he (people have weird names..I'm not judging..) brought up that actually made me more angry/annoyed than anything else.

First off, I thought that the author (which is what I'm going to refer to him/her as for the rest of this blog to avoid the annoying gender guessing game) was pretty harsh when referrring to non-believers. The whole idea of referring to the world they live in as "profane" has negative connotations, and I don't personally believe just because a person doesn't believe in God it automatically believes they have contempt for it (although I'm sure this is definitely the case for some people). But the language the author used was especially harsh and I kind of felt like the author was shaking a finger at all those who the author considered to be "non-believers", kind of writing the essay with two purposes. The way the author refers to non-believers as living in an illusion, and refers to the people as "primitive" (p. 14), as well as the way the author claimed non-believers lived in a "desacralized cosmos" (p.17) seemed very similar to propaganda when I was reading it. This continues throughout the entire chapter and even at the end talks about "for religious man, this profane space represents absolute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance" (p.64). The way the author whips around the word "evil" so easily when referrring to the space a person lives in made me seriously skeptical as to when the author felt the need to write this article. The negative connotations of the language the author used made me feel like the words were selected specifically to create a heirarchy of space, with the religious man's property and space far above the "non-believer"

Another thing that really pissed me off was when the author was talking about the idea of "consecrating territories". I really thought that whole idea was bullshit and to me it seemed more like a justification leaders would use to take over land they wanted, and bring in religion to back their selfish decisions up. The lines that really bothered me started, "Whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground or of conquering and occupying a territory already inhabited by "other" human beings, ritual taking possession must always repeat tge cosmogony" (p.32). The fact that the author is attempting to justify and legitimize the overthrow and possession of land even when it is already owned by others shocked me.

There were a few ideas that I thought were okay or interesting though, I thought when the author was talking about the link between heaven and earth on pg. 41, it reminded me a lot of the house metaphor, with the attic, floors, and basement, and the fact that these people had temples or poles that were suppose to represent death, existence, and heaven.

Also, the idea that "religious man feels the need always to exist in a total and organized world" (p.44) as a really cool and true idea. People are constantly trying to organize and catalog the space around them.

Overall I found more things I disliked than I liked, but there were a few interesting points.