Class Notes 5: "Read these three stories and call me in the morning"

The Wizard of Oz
Jenny's blog:  The most mythological is the ordinary world
connecting the dots...making the picture
Perkins
You don't have to leave Bozeman to find the mythological
the best stories are better if you tell lies about them
that's why Odysseus was so loved by Athena...wily Odysseus
Jared's story: colliding with a stranger on the street
because he switched he ran into him...
Oedipus and the Delphic oracle....he tried to avoid it and that's what sealed his fate
the scripted end
Here's a brief history of the character Oedipus Rex:
http://www.medeaslair.net/oedipus.html
Appointment in Samarra
merchant in Baghdad

"The Appointment in Samarra"
(as retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933])The speaker is DeathThere was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture,  now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.




in the Magus, finds book of TS Eliot's poetry
 as in Oedipus, with Antigone, tragedy comes down through the generations
the suffering never stops, it goes on and on and on


the Norman Bate's motel
Procrustes-robber who stretched or amputed the limbs of his victims
Procrustean argument: stretching the facts to make them fit your argument


"it was bound to happen"  97 of Cadmus and Harmony
you can only admire the results of a contest in which their is a struggle


Jacob and the man wrestling in the bible---because you have prevailed against me, your name shall no longer be Jacob, but it shall be Israel...
 Gagauin's depiction

Humpty Dumpty....had a great fall...so did Adam and Eve, Icarus, we too shall fall, is the human condition
Jame's Joyce's interpretation in Ulysses
St. Augustin:  felix culpa... my most grievous fall... felix (happy) fortunate fall..that adam fell in the garden so that we can be redeemed through Christ
Finnegan-- fall's off a ladder, dies.  feeding the whiskey to the dead man
Fin- the end (French)
Fin- Again  (his wake... so many meanings)
waking up, wake in the water

Funferal-- Funeral

Myth is the precedent behind every action. Ordinary plane in Wizard of Oz and mythological plane

Moses...Superman... raised by foster parents
mythology loves the same old story


http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/Superman.html      

Marvel the Charlatan in Wizard of Oz  ... a magus

stories with this formula:  near death as a child...spirited away, raised by foster parents...becomes a hero
Sigefreud
King Arthur
Jesus
Harry Potter
Hercules
Oedipus

deus ex machina... being raised up to the gods...

helpers:  courage, brains, a heart...   all dorothy wanted was to go home, and this is what all heroes want
but then she discovers the man behind the curtain
it's important for Dorothy to know about the machinery that creates the illusions

but Dorothy has always been able to go home...can go back to Kansas, but is no longer an ordinary world because she has been to another world.
 Same for Nicholas in Magus when he returns from Greece, it has changed her

Calasso

the destroyer of delights
 page 5 of Calasso: But how did it all begin?
Europa was walking with her friends... a cycle of one of the stories within classical mythology
the story of Europa and the Bull..Io...Theseus...Minotaur... it will end with the Bull as well

Europa and the Bull

Theseus and the Minotaur
Sparagmos: dismemberment
Homophaegia: the eating of a body which has been dismembered  (eating the dismembered body of a divinity)
transubstantiation... metomorphoses... cannibalistic rites

The Eucharist: the bread represents the body of Christ, and the wine the blood of Christ
"abduction and metamorphoses"  the two big things to understand Calasso