dribotta’s Blog

Motif: Starvation/Hunger

1.       who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the

brilliant Spaniard to converse about America

and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,

2.       who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
 the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
 Bowery,

3.       who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,

In the beginning the poem starts off using examples of starvation/hunger in regards to people who depend on other people to satisfy their needs. They seek from other people entertainment or food, apparently, not being able to depend on themselves for their own satisfaction. As the poem goes on, it seems that the desires for food are getting very specific, though they are not a reality for the individual. It’s an individual imagining eating lamb stew, it’s more of a dream than a reality. The last verse that I found, to me, signified serious desperation. For a person to plunge themselves underneath a meat truck is definitely someone who is in need of food. I also was thinking that meat trucks are probably not the cleanest, neatest, nicest smelling truck to want to be underneath, so for a person to plunge themselves underneath one, they must really be starving for food.

I think what Ginsberg is trying to say by developing his motif about hunger and starvation is that, for certain people, the idea of never being able to “get out” of one’s own situation is a reality, and a lived reality for most people. There’s no way of overcoming it, there’s no way of making sure that you don’t go hungry, and for certain people, all they are able to do is to go with the flow of life and let life take them where it does. The only way of escaping that starvation and hunger is to die, or abuse one’s body, and the fact that Ginsberg doesn’t show the starving people doing any of these things could be to show that for these people, for themselves only, there is never an out. I think he maybe is trying to show how much these people value their lives by being content with just living everyday begging for food and entertainment, as opposed to just committing suicide or abusing their own bodies for the sake of not being hungry.

What makes loyalty so tragic in the play is that it was never reciprocated in the proper manner. Although there were conventional relationships demonstrated throughout the play (husband/wife, uncle/niece, cousins, and brothers), it is because of loyalty, misplaced loyalty that is, that separates those relationships, and pushes people away from one person, and that much closer to one other. I think that of course, Eddie is at the epicenter for the destruction of loyalties amongst his family and distant relatives. His uncontrollable feelings for his niece is the one reason that forces him to act the way he does, break trusts, turn on people, etc, in order to make sure that his loyalty to her was true, and hers true to him.

I think the only reason for blue-collared workers to hold trust and loyalties in such high regards is that they are all each other has. Blue-collared workers don’t have a lot of resources. They typically live in low-income housing, and to be able to trust someone means being able to trust them with your life. They don’t have that much monetary support from the government, let alone from their job (if they have one). Without loyalty, a person is ultimately alone. They have no one to trust, no one to look up to, and no one to depend on. Also, just like with class systems, you typically live with and near people who share the same circumstances as you. So, the fact that everyone is equal, though there is hardly any money to “show-off’ makes people that much more protective, territorial, and less trusting of the people in their neighborhood. I understand, however, how detrimental it could be to show loyalties and trust another individual outside of your family because it makes you vulnerable. You’re showing your trust to an outsider, someone who is not in your immediate family, who may not necessarily act as you may want them to, and that is what, I think, Eddie struggles with the most, along with his emotions.

 Loyalty is substantially different for Eddie for many reasons. First he has seen what not being loyal can do to someone, in particular, Vinny Bolzano, who snitched on his uncle: “I think he went away. I never seen him again…” (Miller, 18) Eddie knows all about what can happen to someone if they act dishonestly towards their own family. But then that idea made me think, wouldn’t being in love with his niece prove some disloyalties to his wife, or maybe even his sister? Eddie admits himself, “Believe me, Katie, the less you trust, the less you be sorry.” (Miller, 15), knowing that the less people who you rely on, the less chances you have of getting stabbed in the back. I think another reason that loyalty is different for Eddie is because he allowed his emotions to get involved, and not in a good way. He was married, to Beatrice, and his loyalties should have been to her. However, because of his feelings for Catherine, his emotions ruled over his mind, making him believe that his loyalties to Beatrice were pointless, and that he should be loyal to the one he loved.  

Overall, I think it was because of Eddie’s emotions, and the obvious threat that Rodolpho had over him, that became the sole reasons as to why he did what he did. I thought it was ironic that from all of his antics with the Immigration Bureau and getting Rodolpho and Marco gone, it ended up making everyone hate him, it brought everybody else that much closer to each other, and ultimately he was killed because of his disloyalties to everybody else.  He wanted things to go his way, and he never even asked himself, ‘does Catherine love me like I love her?’

My belief on how Hemingway depicted the Indian characters in “Indian Camp” is that yes, they can be regarded as somewhat primitive…as most Indian cultures are if they still live in desolate, “out of the city” environments. Hemingway notes that Nick, his dad, and Uncle George had to travel by “rowboat” just to get to them, meaning that the Indians were way out of the way from the rest of civilization. The fact that it takes Nick’s father to have to come in and help the Indian woman deliver her child means that they don’t have any modern medicinal skills or knowledge to help themselves in times of need. They rely on the experiences of older women, and midwives, signifying that the Indians were technically living in the “present”, but by their cultural tendencies, they were realistically living in the past.

My thought on the Indian woman’s husband and Nick’s father is that I do see them as being somewhat opposites of each other. I think that one thing to note about the differing cultures (Indian and “American”) is that they are extremely different in mostly every way imaginable. Nick’s father isn’t worried about the Indian woman’s screams because, as an educated doctor, he knows why she is screaming. He knows what’s going on with the woman’s body, enough to know that it isn’t a reason to be alarmed: “The baby wants to be born and she wants it to be born. All her muscles are trying to get the baby born. That is what is happening when she screams.” The husband, on the other hand, who has been stuck hearing his wife scream in agony for “two days”, may not understand the reason why she is yelling. He may, for all we know, think that she is going to die because of her screams, not realizing that it’s because of the baby. This thought may connect to him killing himself with the reasoning that he just couldn’t take his wife being in that much pain and discomfort, so to him, the solution was to end his life.  

I think another thing to note is the relationship that the husband and Nick’s father have with the Indian woman. The husband is her husband; her sole provider. They have a relationship far more substantial than that of hers to Nick’s father. In essence, what the woman goes through, the husband does as well, but unfortunately for him, he just couldn’t handle it: “His throat had been cut from ear to ear.” Nick’s father is an outsider, so to speak, he knows nothing of anybody. He was brought in to deliver the baby, and nothing else.

Prior to viewing the Armory Galleries, I first made sure I read and understood the 3 points made about Modernism: 1. Artists are more interested in our perception of a piece of work than anything else. They want to represent something based on how we may be able to understand it, instead of representing something for what it really is. 2. Modern artists challenge the viewers; they “defamiliarize” our understanding what art and poetry is, especially with how we engage their art 3. Pieces of work are very tricky; they are not straight forward, and because of that, it forces the observer to use their own imagination and draw their own conclusion as to what they think the artist is trying to portray. I went in to each of the galleries, not only viewing the pieces of art, but keeping in mind these points in being able to understand how these ideas of Modernism were depicted in the artwork shown.

I first went to Gallery P, French, English, Dutch, and American paintings. Albert Pinkham Ryder’s journey was the first I read about. Towards the end of his life, he reworked some of his past paintings and made them simpler. This engages the idea about Modernism in that because his paintings were so simple, and not so blatantly obvious as to what he was trying to portray, it allowed the viewers to use their own judgment to translate his paintings to what they think he was trying to get across.  Also, Ryder’s paintings were known for their appreciation for evocation as opposed to the technicalities of art. To evoke something is to bring on a change, and more times than not, to evoke an emotion, and I think Ryder used that to his advantage. Emotions in people are different; they are never the same. This concept of his only goes to show how Modern his thoughts were, in that, because everybody has an opinion of their own, their translations of his paintings would all be different, and thus, the emotions evoked because of the paintings would also be different from person to person. Also, James McNeill Whistler, an accredited Modern painter, introduced an idea of Modernism called Verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is when something appears to be true, and because of this, Whistler’s paintings without any question contained Modernism. For something to appear true means that it is not definite, there’s no strict black and white area, his paintings solely contained a “gray area”, forcing his viewers to form their own opinions and thoughts of the truth of his paintings.

I then moved on to Gallery A, which focused mainly on American Sculpture and Decorative Art. A brief description of Andrew Dasburg’s sculpture, Lucifer, was explained. His sculpture was thought to have been a non-representational form of sculpting that was viewed with having an “artistic license” allowing the artist to get away with such a dramatic interpretation. I found ‘non-representational’ to be a direct connection with Modernism because for a sculpture to be as such, it means that is isn’t an ideal, traditional form of what that sculpture is depicting. That “artistic license” sets it, and it allows the artist to change the person, place, thing, etc being sculpted into a new piece of work that the viewer wouldn’t have necessarily expected. This way of sculpting,  yet again, ‘defamiliarizes’ the viewer’s preconceived notions of what they thought something was, and challenges them to few it in another way. Another sculptor, Abastenia St. Eberle, went against what was deemed appropriate for Modernism with her piece titled, White Slave. In this sculpture, she displayed what the sex industry had been viewed as; a place for lust and greed. It was a very literal translation of the sex industry, but more specifically, prostitution. She was frowned upon because of literal and obvious depiction of her piece, only proving that because it was so realistic, it was not a prime candidate for Modernism. It did not allow for imagination, it challenged nothing, and in essence, it represented an aspect of society that everybody had known.

 Next was Gallery D, which centered on American Paintings. Painter Charles Sheeler became especially known by his use of Precisionism, a technique that combined limited numbers of forms and colors to create a scenic and gentle picture. The picture that was featured in the online tour of the Gallery was titled Landscape, a very straight forward title for what the painting was, however the fact that it was so simple allowed it to be a part of Modernism. The blankness of the scenery and the simplistic colors used allowed for the viewers to think of their own concept as to the purpose of the painting, allowing for imaginative thoughts. The painting was not full of people, animals, or any other outside object besides nature. It wasn’t straight forward, and the point of the painting is not known just by looking at it, forcing the viewer to draw their own conclusion to the reasoning behind the painting. Another painter, Agnes Pelton, who, during the 1930’s mastered the technique she entitled “Imaginative Paintings”, in which little variations of sunlight were used and mythological scenes were portrayed instead of contemporary ones. As seen with her painting, Vine Wood, a whimsical woman is walking through a just as whimsical forest, studded with spiritual creatures.  The scene is of an imagined one, one that allows the viewers to think for themselves what is going on. As with religion and mythology, these two ideas, or concepts, are not definite. They are, from what I believe to be, as circumstantial, so it allows the person experiencing the work of art to translate it to what they believe it should be, as opposed to what is “known” of it.

Lastly, I went through Gallery I, which displayed French Paintings and Sculpture. I read about Marcel Duchamp, a painter that utilized his imagination to create original and unique works of art. With one of is his paintings titled Nude Descending a Staircase I tried to imagine what I thought it would look like before I looked at the painting. I thought it would be a nude woman, maybe even a man, walking down a flight of stairs with very gentle colors, an elegant setting, and a very peaceful atmosphere. However, I was completely wrong. I feel like Duchamp’s art reveals the more extreme side of Modernism in that, it’s not so simple and bland as one would have supposed. Instead, his work is so abstract and out there that anybody wouldn’t be able to read the title and expect to see that painting in front of them. It brings up a concept of Modernism in that it defamiliarizes the viewer’s understanding of what art really is, making them engage it with a new perspective, one brought on by the untraditional piece of artwork.

Overall, the paintings that I saw were very relatable to Modernism.  Each in their own ways do they illicit the “rules” that are required for something to be Modern. Modernism is all about challenging people, making them fend for themselves and think thoughts that are their own; instead of the artist’s. It makes them reconsider what they think they know and forces them to think in a different, more imaginative way, steering away from the traditionalistic thoughts and to embark on their own.

The excerpt from Sister Carrie has me thinking that the narrator is someone who is very well educated. His wording, his sentence structure, and his grammar are all very properly used and placed which, to me, signifies educated. Also, the actual person of the narrator  I am not too sure about. It can be assumed that it is a male, because it’s from the mind of Dreiser, however the depth and the amount of insight that the narrator offers of BOTH sexes makes it hard for me to pin point the gender. The narrator speaks as though they know so much about the mind of, not only a man, but a woman, and that’s what confuses me a bit.

From the way the narrator describes Carrie and Hurstwood, it seems as though they want us to note the differences between the two. Not only their genders being different, but to note how their age and their takes on life are so different. I think that the narrator wants the reader to know this because it will eventually lead to something…a problem between them. Regardless of what each person wants, it doesn’t sound like they are on the same page, and that is a surefire way to create tensions.

The narrator’s husband’s death proves to be both a victory and a defeat for the narrator. First of all, being that he is dead, she is free. She ends up being the winner, being alive, through his oppressive and controlling behaviors. But also, she was able to come out victorious because she remained true to herself. Her husband thought she was weird, thought that she was crazy, so it enabled her to be just that much more crazier to top what was said about her. She was right all along about herself, and when he died, that just solidified the way she felt.

Her husband’s death ends up being a defeat for her because, regardless of anything, it was he who put her in the attic, which, because of that, forced her to become the person she was: weird, strange, eccentric, unique, etc. Without her enabler being there to allow her odd behaviors, how will she be able to continue her life the same way? The whole time her husband was alive she tried to prove that she was not crazy, that she was just as he was, so without that “competition” to prove her self, what will her purpose be?

 After great pain, a formal feeling comes

• people are humbled after someone passes away
• not even death; if someone hurts themselves, or gets into an accident, they are much more aware and respectable towards that object that hurt them
• formal feeling: to feel proper; to be proper is to be limited, not crazy with behaviors, so maybe after the great pain, a person tones down their activities

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs

• nerves relating to the mind, body, and soul
• during ceremonies people are calm, relaxed, proper, structured
• tombs present during ceremonies

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

• the stiff heart is referring to the dead person or the person changed by an experience
• stiff: rigid, hard, cold, structure, not emotional, or showing any reaction

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

• would time have made a difference in the way the person was effected by something?
• what does time have to do with anything?
• time period relating to how proper people are/were
• centuries: people were old fashioned, women very controlled, men…not so much

The Feet, mechanical, go round

• feet propel the body forward
• function as something vitally important for an individual
• their mechanical; automatic; they don’t stop unless your dead

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –

• the feet have the ability to move anywhere
• on the ground, in air (airplanes); when were air planes invented?
• ought: better -> better referring to a place that is more respected than the ground…heaven
• how do a person’s feet propel them forward in heaven if they’re dead?
  

A Wooden way

• a coffin
• the dead person propels forward, to heaven, by means of the coffin;
• a way being a path, another “way” of doing something is like another mode of one central idea
• the idea here: dead person, going to heaven…via a coffin

Regardless grown,

• age; gender
• the age of the tree that was used to make the wooden coffin
• unimportant whatever it is

A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

• who is a Quartz?
• why would they be so resenting of someone/something?
• a person’s enemy
• stone cold-> synonym for death

This is the Hour of Lead –

• hourglass->the grain that’s inside
• lead is a substance; an element
• poisonous
• ultimate poison of death

Remembered, if outlived,

• if the person does not die by the time the hour is up

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –

• frozen: not moving, stiff, rigid, ultimately dead
• if they are recollecting the snow, then they are alive again
• another chance
• why are they frozen in the first place?

First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go –

• when someone dies, their body is cold
• living people realize the person is dead: they kiss them goodbye one last time and they feel the cold touch of skin
• lifeless
• the living become hysterical, emotional, when they come to terms with the fact that their loved one has died
• and then, eventually, however long it takes, they let them (the deceased) go
• to move on
• come to terms

My Thoughts:

1. I do not questions that this poem is about death
2. Deals with the emotional journey the living go through to come to terms with the fact that someone died
3. The physical, even spiritual, journey the deceased goes through to get to a better, more diving state
4. They way that she describes everything in such vague, but specific, detail is very admirable
5. I found it interesting how the thoughts that I had meshed together, for the most part, and it allowed me to analyze the poem
6. Each line compliments the proceeding

This question is a little bit confusing, however, I’m going to give my take on it. I think that the reason that “I vs. tide” and “I vs. crowd” pose a problem for Whitman is because when he watches the tide, he is looking at it dead on. He is “face to face” with it, allowing him to be close to the tides on a “personal” level. With the crowd, he can only see them from a distance, not letting him reach that closeness that he wishes to have with everybody. The water is separating him from the crowds of people, and the only way to get past that problem is to conquer the water; thus crossing the ferry.

When the ferry reaches the other side of the river, I think, is how the problem gets resolved. He is “united” with the masses of people, so to speak, and is allowed to be with them once again, to observe them on a much more intimate level.

Some things that I did enjoy from doing this assignment was how everybody was able to input what they thought Whitman’s poem meant. It was interesting to see how differently and similarly everybody thought about Whitman’s work. I also enjoyed how open-ended it was, and how we could decide whatever picture we wanted to to insert into the poem. When the assignment was given in class, I was trying to picture it in my mind but I didn’t really understand what the project would look like. However, once it was all done, and everybody put their picture in the text, it all came together, and it was unique to see the contemporary version of Whitman.

One thing that I didn’t really enjoy was having to link my picture to my page and all that stuff. I’m not all that computer inclined so it was a little frustrating trying to figure it out. It took me some time, however, but I was able to figure out how to link everything up.

When reading the poem, it’s pretty broad as to what Whitman means by his wording, but from doing this project it allowed me to really think about what he means by using images such as nature, trees, sun, etc. We all take for granted the simplicity of nature, and the serenity of it, and by reading Whitman’s work, I’ve found a new appreciation for it. People think we live in such a free society, however, we don’t. There are laws, rules, societal customs, etc that we must abide by, but in nature, anything goes, and that was one of the major aspects I got from Whitman. Being in nature isn’t a bad thing. It’s probably the only place in the universe where an individual is totally free, no rules, no boundaries, completely free.  

The only thing that I would change, aside from trying to simplify the linking of pictures to blogs, would be to assign people lines. I think that by doing that, certain lines wont get repeated, and almost all of the lines/phrases would be touched upon and we’d be able to get a better sense as to the entirety of what Whitman’s poem means to us.

I chose the image of the sun shining through a tree because of the simplicity of it, but also because it made sense in regards to the poem. I got inspiration for the image from the line,  ”You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left…” The picture shows both, the earth and the sun, but more specifically, the tree filtering the amount of light through its branches. Not all of the light is shining through, but only the light that is capable of seeping through the branches to make it to the other side.

The line continues with “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”

Just like with Emerson’s beliefs about books and institutions, Whitman shares those same beliefs regarding them as unhelpful means of getting information. I don’t think that this picture literally relates to the contemporary experience of an individual in 2009, but symbolically I think it does in that we need to decide for ourselves good vs. bad, and things of that nature, and the only way to do that is by filtering in the material that we deem helpful, and casting aside those that offer us little to no good. To learn the ways of life by actually getting out there and having experiences are the necessities we need to allow to sink in to us, and the information retold in books are the ones we need to cast off.

http://english158.wetpaint.com/page/Whitman%2C+%22Song+of+Myself%22