Sonnets and Sonnets

     As we discovered in class today, I have a finite mind. As such, I have to write rough drafts of dead words. Wow, that's so morbid. I haven't tried applying the whole iambic pentameter thing yet, but anyway, here's my sonnet as it is today.

Sonnet 1
For you, shall I climb up on this mountain?
If I shout your name to the cascading valley,
If I finish this wonderfully ambiguous quatrain
Will these desperate pleas, will they make you love me?
And if love be such a beautiful thing,
Will the valley shout back rejoice?
As this speech echoes, listen to the valley sing.
When I tell you I love you, listen to the valley voice.
The falls cascade to their far deep baths
The land left awash in this echo of mocking
And listen now, for at these words it laughs.
A valley voice performs the infinite, and at this love it's balking.
But if I tell you I love you, at the end of this couplet,
Will you tell me you love me? Won't you settle this bet?

Sabrina

A Small Epiphany for a Wednesday Afternoon

     I've tried blogging once before only to discover I fail miserably at it. My roommate and I made a blog at the start of this school year, expecting to share all of our knowledge and adventure with the world. Still, to this day, there is but one lonely post dated November 5, 2012. I've been told for years that blogging is a great way for writers to write daily, so I was a bit disgruntled to find my blogging skills so dramatically lacking (unfortunately, one must actually post in order for a blog to be successful). While Redeeming Shakespeare has still been difficult to keep up with on the daily, I have found it much easier to find subject matter. My other blog (we'll just call it RSA) was deemed an "anything and everything" blog; my roommate and I did not want to be tied down to any strict subject. This, however, was the first and biggest mistake of our blogging career. If I am writing about everything then it follows logically that I am writing to everyone. Beside the fact that this is impossible for nearly every writer, I didn't even want to write to everyone. I wanted to write only to those who cared about the adventures in my life - and that's a small number. The second problem, then, was that we did not know who we were actually writing to. Dr. Mark Schlenz taught me that if I ever want to be published in any format, I must be able to visualize the audience reading the final product. This is why Redeeming Shakespeare is so much easier than RSA, because I know all of you and I know what you expect to hear.
     Now, I said above that "nearly every writer" finds it impossible to write to everyone because there is one writer who did write to the audience of everyone, and I think you know where I'm going with this. Shakespeare wrote to the gods, the kings, the commoners, and the chaotic, and was completely aware that he did so. This, above every other accomplishment, is the reason Shakespeare is the greatest poet in history. Shakespeare's plays were written to the world, and I still cannot fathom how he managed it. If a writer can discover, once more, how to write to the Globe, he might be the next greatest: but I think the key is to just not try so hard.

Write on,
Sabrina

Imagination

     Unfortunately, I cannot remember why we were talking about Samuel Taylor Coleridge a few classes ago, but I do remember that we were trying to find the full quote of his "primary imagination" spiel. Well, I found it.

"The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation....it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead." 

      Coleridge goes on to say, "[A poet] diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and...fuses by that synthetic and magical power...the imagination."  One well worded interpretation of this statement, written by Katherine D. Harris, reads as follows, "As soon as the poet decides to write down his or her poem...the work is inevitably diminished." The solidity of the words written remove the idea from pure and perfect imagination and turn the idea into an object, which Coleridge claims is then "fixed and dead." This is all well and good - and true, in my opinion - but Coleridge did not say it first. The following you'll remember from A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; / And as imagination bodies forth / the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen / turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / a local habitation and a name." -Theseus Act V, Scene 2

     In Theseus speech, Shakespeare claims just the same; the poet turns imagination into object.
     In the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein Mary Shelley wrote, "My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings."
     John Cage, primarily a composer, once said, "[Art is] an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living." Or, perhaps, the very dreams we're dreaming? For what is life if not fueled by dreams?
     And finally, Allan Kaprow, a painter from the 50s and 60s, claimed, "'Anything' was too easy....If anything was art, nothing was art."
     So what does all this mean? Why did I decide that all these quotes fit together and create meaning? I have no idea; you tell me.

Sabrina

REM Behavior Disorder

     Yesterday, when I was searching for Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome, I found something else just as interesting. When we are children the part of the brain that keeps us from "acting out" our dreams is not fully developed yet. In most cases, this leads to mild sleepwalking or simply moving around while asleep, and eventually our brains learn to paralyze our bodies while in REM sleep. However, if the brain experiences trauma in this area before it fully develops - or after, if the trauma is severe enough - the brain will not be able to paralyze the body. In this case, patients actually "act out" their dreams: jumping out of windows, running, speaking, dancing.
     If that isn't the most Shakespearean sleep disorder in science to date then I don't know what is.

Sabrina

Keep Dreaming

     I had an elaborate, and cheesy, post planned on the subject of dreams. In it, I would have first admitted to only remembering my dreams on extremely rare occasions; but don't worry; I would have gone on to explain that a writer thinks only in dreams, in stories, and in this way, I can dream. In all honesty I was not at all excited to write it.
     I was then so lucky as to come across something interesting enough to replace that fluff. I just finished watching a television show in which one of the characters had a brain disorder that made him unable to dream. I googled the disorder, and while the name in the show was falsified, there is actually a real-life condition. Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome is a condition in which a person is unable to revisualise images or memories - their brain just doesn't record them - so they have no substance with which to build dreams. CWS is extremely rare, but it is caused by severe brain trauma, most often strokes.
     The character in the TV show explained the disorder thusly: "Do you know what that's like? Not to be able to dream? You never rest, not really. It's like being awake for fifteen years." This is an interesting idea, that we can only rest in dreams, in falsified worlds that allow us to leave the solidity of Earth. So, if dreams last for mere seconds, in our six-nine hours a night of lazing our minds recover only in those last few moments. I'm not claiming that we all shouldn't sleep. Sleeping is fantastic, and our bodies need the rest of those hours to recover. But, if we were unable to dream would our minds ever get a break? Do you think at some point they would just give up? We survive in our dreams.
     But what of bad dreams? Hamlet claims in Act 2, Scene 2 to have such dreams: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." Does Hamlet claim, here, to literally have frightful dreams, or is he admitting to simply dreaming poorly? I don't remember my dreams often; does my lack of recall mean I am a bad dreamer? I still have dreams; my brain functions just enough to build worlds, but not often does it remember its creations, and this brings us to the most important idea in this whole revelation. We survive in our dreams - our minds recover their sanity as they construct novels; our minds can act alone in this, and we do not need to be aware of their discoveries in order to recover our conscious sanity. We must simply bask in our own creations.
     It is when we try to understand them that they become Bottom's Dream. No dream has a bottom.

Keep dreaming,
Sabrina

The Big Bad Wolf

     In fifth grade I played the Big Bad Wolf in my elementary school's production - you might remember such famous lines as, "I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down." I tormented the pigs and I roared at the crowd - much like Snug in a Midsummer Night's Dream. And also much like Snug and the gang, I believed myself to be terrific: I was the greatest Wolf to ever saunter the stage.
     I distinctly remember running up to my mom at the end of the show and begging for assurance, "Was I good? I thought I messed up my speech." And she, and my grandma, and my grandpa, and my dad all tore down my doubt; they claimed I was fantastic. The family sitting beside them even chimed in, and if I thought I was great and my family thought I was great then, by God, I was great! Who's to say I wasn't?
     Now really, I was awful. I'll be the one to say I wasn't great; I was in fifth grade and I'm no prodigy, but in my ignorance I competed with all my idols. Shove off, Mickey Rooney, Sabrina Hayes has just stepped on the scene.
     Ignorance breeds confidence. In some adults, this may be dangerous, sure, but in children and in fools it becomes art. In A Midsummer Night's Dream Philostrate says of the coming play (put on by Bottom and friends), "[It] made mine eyes water; but more merry tears / The passion of loud laughter never shed" (5.1.147). He's warning Theseus against watching the play, and yet the rehearsal still brought him enjoyment, so where is the fault? Theseus demands to see the play; he says, "Never anything can be amiss / When simpleness and duty tender it" (5.1.149). This is the crux: we work with what we have available to us, like Quentin Tarantino and our friend, Shakespeare. When the skills and the language are lacking, but we still try to function in our simpleness, to form something beautiful, it is poetic; it is art. That's the beauty of the chaotic, and Shakespeare saw it too; he encouraged it.
     We all celebrate our greatness even when we are so clearly not, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Be mindful, Mickey Rooney,
Sabrina Hayes, The Big Bad Wolf