Meme Able Me

One thing I may have neglected to tell you is that Wordplay now has its own Facebook page, and you can visit us there any time you feel you just can’t make it another day without us. (I’m really not being facetious, or not totally so. These things happen.) I thought about doing this several years ago when I was trying to promote my book and came across some writerly advice about starting a Facebook page. I don’t actually remember the reason I didn’t do it; in any case, the page is more an adjunct to the blog than it is to the book. As you know, Wordplay ranges over many interests since its underlying theme is mythology and everyday life. It has a structure but a very open one due to the subject matter.

Recently someone asked me for input on some labyrinth-building projects here, and while I was glad to give my opinion, I had to explain that my interest in the topic was not from the standpoint of building or using labyrinths but more from a literary stance. I think that the book, while timely, actually has a long shelf life and could be read by anyone with an interest in literary criticism or epistemology, at any time. I also ventured into social criticism with follow-up work that explored some of the social and political reasons why labyrinths may have started trending in the first place. While these topics remain an interest, I felt several years ago that I’d done as much as I wanted to with them and was ready to go in other directions.

It’s challenging to write a blog concerned with cultural mythology. I see a lot of things on the Internet and elsewhere that I don’t feel are worth commenting on or wasting anyone else’s time with. I’ve taken to posting links and images on the Facebook page that catch my eye, and if you’ve seen it, you know that I usually take a light-hearted approach. My voice is the same there as it is here, but the Facebook page is more conducive to sharing links and graphics and creating memes. I sometimes laugh when I’m working on it.

A couple of days ago, I came across a video in my Facebook newsfeed from Mom Versus. The heroine of this Facebook page often posts videos of herself trying out recipes and is in a decidedly humorous vein. After posting a video of her making an American Flag Cake, I was playing around with the idea of “Southern belles” and kept thinking of the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, which was, as you may remember, entitled “The Bells.” I ended up branching off from my original idea but still managed to create a meme in which I brought together two very disparate things, Mom Versus and Game of Thrones. (If anyone can find similarities in completely unrelated things, it’s Wordplay. Remember Say Yes to the Dress?)

I plan to continue the Facebook page along with the blog; the page has more than once served as a point of inspiration for that week’s blog post. Sometimes it’s as simple as a photo I took myself and posted; other times, the inspiration comes from something in the culture. I’m often hesitant to “buy into” trends I see or to comment on the news (holds head in hands), but with humor, a lot of things are possible. You can make a serious point without seeming to, or you can just be silly.

Please check us out on Facebook if you feel moved to do so. You’ll recognize that both “feet” and “cups” (two very everyday things) have played a somewhat outsized role in some of our doings so far. I’m not really sure I can explain why this has happened, just that it has.

Wordplay Feels You on Fake News

Today was a nice enough summer day, I guess, but nothing like as simple as some of the lazy summer days I remember from the past. Modern life is constantly throwing complications at you. If reading the news makes you cry, forget the news and just find a good book, right? Sounds good in concept, so you head over to the library and wait for it to open, getting bitten by mosquitoes and sweating in the humidity, because the building opens late on Sundays. Finally, the hour arrives, and you go in with the other patrons, looking forward to getting a new book in your hands, although experience has taught you not to get too excited these days about anything.

You plug in, pull up NoveList, and start browsing titles. You know, because you’ve done this before, that some of them will sound amazing but prove to be disappointing, but still, facts are facts: English majors are ever hopeful about books. After looking for a while, taking the time to check your account to make sure that newfangled “Book History” is still turned off (because, a little too Big-Brotherish, even if seemingly harmless for someone with mild tastes), you home in on a couple of books. One sounds Edwardian and mildly interesting, and the other catches your eye because you saw it at the bookstore’s checkout counter recently and noted that it was a retelling of a Shakespeare play.

You check out both and settle in for a little reading in a refreshingly quiet back section of the library (relatively speaking: all libraries are noisier than they once were, especially this one). You’re a few pages into the first book when that familiar sinking feeling sets in, because, alas, the story is not what you thought it would be at all. You’re not losing yourself in the pages, you’re getting annoyed, whether because the story is not what you were hoping for or because the author’s mannerisms draw attention away from the story, you’re not sure which.

Fine, put that one down and pick up the other one, the one based on Shakespeare. This is an author whom, despite his having lost you completely on his last outing, you have decided to gift with another chance. At one time, he seemed unobjectionable and even distinguished, but now . . . Did you even get off the first page or were you all the way to the second page before you began to quoth, “Nevermore!” and slam that book shut, too.

Many artists seem preoccupied these days with “peacocking.” What else do you call it when a capable and even remarkable writer good enough to write a bestseller and/or literary prize winner starts preening, winking, talking to you from the back of his/her hand, and spouting nonsense. They might as well title the book, The Only Book You Need to Read, and in substitution for other content, drop in the words, “I know everything, I’m so important, and even if I don’t know what I’m talking about, I need your undivided attention.” Someone has gotten hold of these people and ruined them.

In complete fairness, let me say that the day may come when I will have to retract some of my opinions, too. I’ve considered opposite points of view too many times for all of the ideas I’ve expressed to be true—some of them have to be wrong. You do the best you can with what you know, and when people seem determined to spread disinformation, it’s difficult to know where the truth is. In that case, you consider alternate possibilities and try not to get overly attached to a single point of view. Rather than “wishy-washy,” I prefer the Keatsian term “negative capability”—the capacity to move among different points of view without settling too firmly into one entrenched position. Yes, confusion and doubt are the hazards of this type of thinking, but I’ve never been able to understand how some people can be so sure of everything anyway. How do you know that? Don’t you think it might be better to hold off on trumpeting something until you know more about it? I feel on firm ground with very few things besides the Golden Rule as a good (though not perfect) starting point.

When I write non-fiction, I try to be accurate and without malice. When I write fiction, I just try to capture the story out of my head (no small task) and tell it as well as I can. Artistic integrity, to me, is keeping the crafting of the story as your single aim. Name-dropping, scoring points on enemies (yes, I know Dante did it, thanks for bringing that to my attention), and spreading propaganda are artistic sins that we hope most people try to avoid.

If you’re wondering, I did end up leaving the library with a book, a collection of the short novels of John Steinbeck. When I’m in doubt, I go back to the classics. I’m sure Mr. Steinbeck had his faults, too, but at least he can’t alienate me by trying too hard to be in-the-know.

Urania Explains How Life Became Cubist

I’ve only had two art history classes in my life, but they obviously exercised a huge influence on my imagination. I sometimes think in terms of images I’ve seen; maybe another way to say this is that the study of art history primed me to notice moments when art imitates life. Great paintings wouldn’t have the power to enchant us if they didn’t contain archetypal material, and that sometimes creates a feeling of recognition when you least expect it.

I’ve written about this before. I had lived in my last apartment for many years before I realized that the view of the roof lines on the opposite side of the street reminded me very much of René Magritte’s The Dominion of Light, especially at certain times of the day. Peach-colored sunsets have more than once made me think of Maxfield Parrish’s extravagant and billowing clouds. I was looking out my back window one summer day late in the afternoon when the quality of light on the opposite wall reminded me of Winslow Homer. I wasn’t even sure what I had in mind when this happened—possibly the light on the sail in Homer’s Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)—but that wall definitely looked like Homer.

Recently, I was on a downtown street near the courthouse when I was stopped in my tracks by a view of mixed architectural styles and roof lines visible from where I was standing. It instantly brought Thomas Cole’s The Architect’s Dream to mind, and although the elements in the real-life view didn’t match those in the painting point for point, there was enough similarity to make it seem that the painting had, in a manner, sprung to life before my eyes. A long, horizontal, arcade-like building, a pediment, pyramid shapes, a massy square building with rounded arches, a Gothic steeple—all were there in a jumble, just as in the painting.

A similar art-related experience I’ve had more than once is to see a painting that creates a feeling of déjà vu that I can’t explain. Sometimes I feel that I may only have encountered the place in my imagination and not in reality at all. A Pre-Raphaelite painting of a solitary knight pausing in a forest may remind me of reading King Arthur for the first time, just as a moonlit scene of an Italian bridge may bring to mind a place encountered in one of Mary Stewart’s novels.

I once took an online quiz that was supposed to tell me “which famous painting I was.” Whatever the result, was I was flattered by it—I believe it may have been something by one of the Impressionists. But if you asked me a different question—“Which artist could best paint life as you are now living it?”—I would have to say Picasso, and it would be the style of painting in which the same face is depicted from several angles at once. Of course, a Hillmanian would have a perspective like this, but more than that, I think modern life (as I experience it, at least) creates a feeling of time speeding up in some places and slowing down in others that often leaves things a little out of joint. I experience myself much as I always have, but I seem to be caught in a crosswind of dimensional planes that leaves me goggling at the unlikelihood of it all. I’m ahead of myself in some areas and lagging behind in others; my elbow may be in one place, my foot in another, and my shoulder in another plane entirely.

I never particularly identified with Cubism before, but life and art have some surprising corners. I just saw an article that mentioned some sort of a hole on the edge of the Milky Way that’s been identified by a Harvard scientist. It’s far too vast to be caused by a star, she says, and the culprit may possibly be “dark matter.” Don’t you just know it! Dark matter interfering not only with the galaxy but with my nice Impressionist life and skewing the whole thing Cubist! Just wait till I get hold of the sucker . . . There won’t be a wormhole small enough for it to hide in.

Storm to the South

A little while ago I watching a storm cloud move across the sky south of me. I thought I could almost see a funnel cloud in the middle of it and imagined having to hide behind the counter in the cafe if it veered in this direction. The sky got darker, there were rumbles in the distance, and then it rained, but that was all. It’s been a rainy spring here but nothing very far out of the ordinary so far.

I like thunderstorms, but they’re usually milder here than the ones I remember from growing up in Florida. There, the rain assumed a tropical intensity, and lightning seemed to split the sky wide open. Some years ago, I was riding Amtrak through Iowa, and I clearly remember the thunderstorm that blew up as we were sitting down to dinner that night. With the flatness of the land and lack of buildings it was possible to see a long way, and we had an unobstructed view of the storm, which seemed notable for the intensity and frequency of the lightning but was after all probably nothing unusual for the northern plains.

I remember thinking that I hadn’t seen a storm like that since Florida. I don’t know if the spring storms are more intense over Iowa than they are over Kentucky or whether it’s the wide-angle views that make storms seem bigger. It was fun to watch the storm from the safety of the dining car, just as it’s always enjoyable to sit in a dry room, preferably in a cozy chair with a book in hand, and watch rain fall.

Not so fun to be caught out in a storm in a place like Texas or Oklahoma, though. It’s safe to say that a career as a storm chaser is out of the question for me, since my instinct is to go away from a storm, not toward it. A couple of years ago, I was on my way to visit a friend in the Dallas area, and just south of the city, I ran into the blackest, most ominous cloud I’ve ever seen, really downright Dante-esque if you can picture what a storm cloud rolling out of Inferno itself would look like. I was alarmed but noted that no one else was pulling off the road, so, like them, I just kept going until I drove out of it some twenty minutes later. There was no thunder with this storm, but driving into it was like running into a solid wall of water, and it stayed that way until I drove out from under the cloud, back into normal reality, twelve miles from my friend’s house.

Why is this mythic? Well, all natural phenomena are part of the fabric of myths and have their own gods and goddesses (we were just talking about Iris, the Greek goddess of rainbows, last week). In modern life, we talk about weather in scientific terms, and even if you watch The Weather Channel for hours at a time, as I’ve been known to do, you’ll hear hardly a mention of Thor, Aeolus, Zeus, or any other weather god from the old stories, though Old Man Winter may sometimes be mentioned in a whimsical way.

Some people like the idea of reverting to the old nature religions that tend to personify natural events and give them human qualities. My enjoyment of nature isn’t diminished by hearing it spoken of scientifically. The science of weather is complex and fascinating, and the forms and characteristics of the old myths play around the edges of my imagination when I watch weather programs or look at a storm through a window. Is there some reason a scientific approach has to clash with having an imaginative relationship to the world? Not that I can see. I can listen with interest while someone describes the dynamics of a tornado and still find that the archetypal twister in my mind is the one that carried Dorothy to Oz.

The Knight of Cups Has a Message for You

Often I feel that I’m reacting to things I see in the culture, just playing with repetitions and coming up with associations. I rarely see myself as someone who “starts things”—for instance, I didn’t start the phenomena of modern beverage cups and bottles in scenes of medieval settings on famous TV shows—but I did have fun taking pictures of my own coffee and tea cups and putting together little montages with them (see Wordplay’s Facebook page for the photo essay). That’s how I got from a water cup at breakfast to an image of the Knight of Cups from the Tarot, a symbolic progression that may or may not mean anything but was fun to do.

Cups have a symbolism of their own, and I was playing in my montage with the idea of being “offered something.” The tricky thing with symbols is that they often contain more than one meaning, and even opposite meanings. A cup can represent refreshment, potential, receptivity, and a number of other things, but it can equally represent the opposite of any of those—it might contain poison, for instance, instead of refreshment. A closed container could represent “keeping the lid on something” rather than an offering.

Now, I will plead guilty to starting a word association game with the word “iris,” but I was only doing it on my Facebook page for fun, so if you start seeing it everywhere suddenly, don’t blame me. It was the montage of the cups that actually morphed, more or less organically, into the iris montage. I paired an image of my iced tea cup at McDonald’s with a photo of a partial rainbow that I took a couple of weeks ago because they had a similar “arch” (or “arc,” I guess, if we were still talking about Game of Thrones). Naturally, being a myth person, I then started thinking about who was the goddess of rainbows in Greek mythology, and she, of course, was Iris.

So I found a painting of Iris that looked old enough to be in the public domain (and honestly, that was my main criterion): this was Guy Head’s Iris Carrying the Water of the River Styx to Olympus for the Gods to Swear By. Iris happens to be holding a pitcher, which is not a cup, but close enough, and although she appears to be having a major wardrobe malfunction, she seems to know exactly where she’s going and to be heading there with all possible speed. The treatment is suitably dramatic and even includes several repetitions of curved arches in the rainbow itself, the stone, the reflection, the drapery, etc., so the painting is all over the arches theme in just about every way conceivable.

After that, I started thinking about other meanings and associations of the word “iris,” which is, of course, more than a goddess’s name. It’s the part of your eye that surrounds the pupil, and it’s the name of a flower. It was also the name of a show by the Cirque du Soleil that I saw in Los Angeles some years ago, my one and only time of seeing that famous troupe, and quite an experience it was. The theme of cameras, lenses, and “seeing” was evident in the show, which had a Hollywood theme, though I really don’t remember the details, just the overall impression of the spectacle. One of my favorite moments occurred before the curtain went up, when I was idling in my seat, and a performer opened a hidden, circular window at the top of the stage (I was in an upper balcony) and looked out at me momentarily before snapping it smartly shut. I had the impression of having been “winked at.”

So I put together Iris of the rainbow and pitcher with a photo of my own eye and added in a logo from Cirque du Soleil’s Iris (though the one I chose is a stark black and white and hardly does justice to the jumble of color and motion I remember). Lastly, I added an image of Vincent van Gogh’s Irises, which probably needs no introduction to anyone, as famous and beautiful as it is. I have sat or stood in front of that painting at the Getty Museum for many minutes at a time on more than one occasion—seeing it was one of the highlights of the first weekend I ever spent in Los Angeles. Curiously, I had somehow gotten the impression that irises are a symbol of healing but when I did some cursory research to confirm that before posting the image to Facebook, I found plenty of other symbolic meanings for the flower but nothing related to healing. I’m now curious about where the healing idea came from and feel that it may have been from something I saw in the museum, though it was so long ago that I’m not sure.

So we now have a rainbow goddess with trailing drapery, a highly acrobatic circus spectacle, a structure of the eye, and a flower, and if you thought I was going somewhere specific with all that, the answer is “not really.” It was all in play, in keeping with the theme of this blog. But if “the eye is (indeed) the window to the soul”—watch out. It could be yourself you see reflected in that photo essay. Maybe Wordplay itself is all just a gigantic Rorschach test—you never know.