Truth and Reality

Truth and reality can be two completely different things, as Plato explains in “The Allegory of the Cave”.  Truth can be subjective, which may seem paradoxical, but what one may believe is true may be seen as untrue to someone else, and they can each be equally right within their own personal views of their realities. The prisoners believed the shadows they were seeing were the actual objects, because in their world, they had only ever seen these images, so they did not know they were just shadows of the actual three-dimensional objects. Once the prisoner was released, his reality was shifted, and what was once a truth now seemed an illusion. Reality itself does not change, because it is the actual state of the world, but one’s perception of reality, one’s beliefs of what is true, can change. This is possible because of ignorance. As is explained in the beginning of the story, we live in ignorance. We accept this state of ignorance as true, as reality, because it is all we have ever known. But once something comes along to enlighten us, and we are no longer ignorant about something, our understanding of truth is changed as this new knowledge is registered and integrated into our existing knowledge. With this new definition of what is true, our perception of reality is changed to reveal this new piece of information, the latest version of the truth. As Plato explains, once one has been exposed to this new truth, one adjusts their view of reality to match, but it is a process, it takes time to adjust to this new view. But once one does, it opens up even more opportunities to discover more truths, and trying to deny this new truth and go back into the ignorance is not only impossible, but is eventually not desired. 

Oh Poe

I have a compilation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and poems. I got it out to reread “Annabel Lee” when I think it was Kelsey who said she was doing her explication on that poem. And then I decided to read The Tell-Tale Heart. Even though it’s one of the most famous of Poe’s stories, I had never read it, though of course I knew the gist of the story. I know it’s supposed to be creepy, but I found the man’s attempts to prove his sanity funny, just because every thing that he brought to attention to prove he wasn’t mad just proved how mad he really was. First of all, that he was willing to kill this old man because his eye crept him out, and he thought that was reasonable and acceptable, is not how a mentally stable person thinks. How he describes the clever way he snuck his head into the room only sounds ridiculous, his laughter does not help his case, the precautions he took when hiding the body add to his insanity, and of course hearing the old man’s heart. But not only hearing it once the old man is dead, but hearing it when he was alive, and thinking that every one else could surly hear it as well, proves how paranoid and insane he had become. Though Poe is known for horror, he has these comedic elements that make you laugh, but then disturb you because of how insane this person is. Being Poe, this is of course a creepy story, not only in plot but also in delivery. Just like the madman, the story starts off slowly and steadily, and then gradually gets faster as the man gets madder, until there’s a rush of thoughts and sounds and emotions in the last paragraph as the man goes completely off the edge of sanity with his paranoia. Though the beating of the heart isn’t actually written with words, like “bum-bum-bum”, just the description of its noise level,” it grew louder – louder – louder!” as the man’s thoughts race makes the reader hear the beating heart. It’s the man’s thoughts, and it’s he that is thinking it’s getting louder, so to tell it like that, instead of the actual sound the heart makes, puts you inside the mind of the madman even more, until you start to feel paranoid and hear the sound as well. That is the genius of Poe, using the first person to put you into the mindset of a madman who thinks he is a genius, but is sadly just disturbed. At first, the madman is talking to the reader, so you get to judge him, because that’s basically what he’s saying and asking you to do. But once he has killed the old man and starts hearing the beating heart again, he stops talking to the narrator, stops trying to impress, and becomes truly worried and crazed by the noise. It is then that you start to see inside of him, into what he is thinking and how his mind works. He does not think he is mad at all, and unfortunately it is that fact and his own paranoia that lead to his downfall. He doesn’t consider that the noise is all in his head, he immediately assumes it is real and that everyone else can hear it and therefore knows what he did. The madman was so confident in his plan, yet he almost immediately accepts that the police know of his plan, despite its ingenuity and cleverness, which shows his deep paranoia and insecurity which led him to kill the old man in the first place – because his eye made him feel uncomfortable. 

“I think how the world is still somehow beautiful even when I feel no joy at being alive within it. ”

I finished First They Killed My Father. It was an incredibly powerful book – powerful in storytelling and powerful in meaning.

Though Loung becomes desensitized to the violence and death all around her, the reader does not, and every description of every wound, every dead body, is a shock. It horrifies me, not just the description, but that this little girl saw all this, saw a man get his head bashed in, felt the blood and brains of her friend, smelt the overpowering stench of decaying and burning flesh. To read about it is horrific enough, but to experience it – just thinking about someone else experiencing it is so sickening. At the end of the book there is a small note from the author, where she tells about how she came to write the book. She explains how she knew she had to write it in a little girl’s voice, because that was who she was when it happened. She also forced herself to write in the present tense, because though it was more painful for her, the past tense would have distanced not only herself but the readers as well from the pain, and it is the pain that makes the story so powerful, along with the hope. Loung spent the four years of her young life hating the Khmer Rouge, wanting to kill them all for what they did to her family. But slowly, she comes to realize that hate will not help anything, it won’t change anything. When she watches the execution of one Khmer solider as a child, at first she shares the crowd’s rage and call for revenge, for blood. But as she watches the solider slowly die in pain, she starts to see him as a person. She wonders if that is how her father was killed, by the same type of vindictive bloodthirsty people, and she feels pity for the soldier, realizing he is just a person as well. But she still has not reached the point of letting go of her hate completely, because she reasons that it is “too late” to stop the execution, too late for all the people the Khmer Rouge has hurt. Eventually Loung learns to let go of the anger, but before she can come to terms with the pain, she spends many more years in America trying to block out her past. But she couldn’t move on until she dealt with it, and it was when she began to work with Campaign for a Landmine-Free World that she was able to feel better, knowing she was helping by telling her story and raising awareness. Her hope, which had been crushed time and time again in the four years of Pol Pot’s rule, always came back, and she began to rely again on hope instead of anger to keep her from giving up.

I am also reading 1984 right now, and as they are both sort of about dystopian societies, there are many similarities. One similarity is in the propaganda. In the children’s solider camp where Loung was forced to live, the Met Bong in charge gave nightly speeches of propaganda about the mighty Khmer Rouge and the evil Youns. Where she used to spout out praise for the Angkar, as the leader and source of power, she then changes her speeches, praising Pol Pot in place of the Angkar. It seems like suddenly it is Pol Pot who leads the Khmer Rouge, brought them to power, and rules the country. The children switch from chanting “Angkar! Angkar!” to “Pol Pot! Pol Pot!”. It is Pol Pot who now receives the credit for every accomplishment by the Khmer Rouge, and Pol Pot who is more greatly respected, and feared. This is similar to 1984, when the allies in the war switch, and suddenly every poster and every news bit had to be rewritten to account for the change in allies. And of course, this in turn is similar to Animal Farm, and the sheep that bleat the propaganda blindly, without noticing when drastic changes have been made. That is happened in real life, this propaganda works and is effective in hoodwinking people, that’s a scary thought.

I will probably have to wait a few days to gather my thoughts when I’m not so busy so I can write more about this book, because it really deserves it.

"The chief told us the Angkor would take care of us and would provide us with everything we need. I guess the Angkor doesn't understand that we need to eat."

So I don’t know if this is a book of literary merit, it’s a national bestseller…

The book is sort of combination of an autobiography and an account of a historical event, so you get to learn more about the history of a country while still reading a story, with characters and a plot etc. – basically my perfect idea of a novel. 

It is basically nonfiction, but embellished into a kind of storytelling, so the events are real but all the dialogue and details have most likely been embellished and added on to, since I doubt the author could remember every word of every conversation from when she was five. But I really like the way it was written. It is written from the point of view of the author as a young girl, limited in the sense of not knowing what will happen next, even though the author does know since all this has happened in her life. What’s interesting is that it partly sounds like a five year old speaking at times, disconnected and confused and in-the-dark about complex issues, but it also uses “big words”, more sophisticated than a five-year-old’s vocabulary would be, like “permeate” and “concave”. Though this could be seen as errors in continuity, I find it interesting. It would probably be difficult to describe all the scenes using such a limited vocabulary, and the combination of the simple and the advanced give the story this unique tone, that makes it all the more frightening and heart-wrenching to read. A five year old’s perspective on serious adult problems told with both “children” and “grown-up” words, creates this crudely mature tone of the story. It reflects in a way the stunted physical growth of the girl contrasted with her forced rapid mental maturity, having to grow up way too quickly. 

            This one scene stood out to me because it related to what I was learning in Death and Dying at the time. The author, the girl Loung, being too sick from starvation to work in the fields, occupies her time by watching the villagers bury the dead. Whole families are dying because of starvation, and the rest of the village is too weak to bury them all quickly. Loung watches as they dump whole families into mass graves under the huts of the dead, as maggots and flies and the “stench of death” fill the village. Loung admits that a disturbing scene like this would have “terrified” her, but that now, she has seen it all so often, she feels “nothing”. This is sort of like what is happening today, as I learnt in Death and Dying. People are becoming desensitized with death, because they see it so often in media, in wars, etc. Loung, having lived a privileged life, had hardly ever even seen poor people before the change in government, let alone a dead or dying person. They now surround her on all sides, and in such a short time she has had to adjust to accept this as part of her life now, and deal with it. Death can no longer be ignored, especially since she herself is so close to it. But while she is numb to the dead in a way, it still consciously follows her every thought. Being close to death, she both has had to accept it as a normal part of every day life, and be aware of its impending doom every second to strive to stay alive. It is a concept almost impossible to understand to one who has never had to experience it. Death threatens her from many sources, starvation, diseases, and every neighbor, who would sell her family out and murder them all if they knew who they really were. So while being around the dead constantly has desensitized Loung, it has also heightened her awareness, knowing she could very well be next. 

            Another scene that stood out to me related to Hamlet, in a few ways. Lacking food, Loung and her family, and the rest of the village, continually search for new sources of food, from leaves to bugs. Chong, a widowed neighbour, discovers that earthworms are safely edible and abundant. Loung, who has eaten crickets, raw rabbit, blood soup, and worse, is horrified at the idea of eating earthworms. What horrifies her is the thought that earthworms eat corpses, and so eating an earthworm would be like eating the flesh of a dead body. At six years old, you wouldn’t expect her to know this, but unfortunately, she has seen enough maggot-infested dead bodies to be able to clearly visualize just what the earthworm, and by extension she, would be eating. This is just like in Hamlet, when the circle of life is explained in that a fish eats a maggot, a human eats the fish, and then a maggot eats the human. Loung, who watched as corpses of men, women, and children were tossed into graves, could not overcome this idea, which is really the heart of life. It also relates to Hamlet in that the neighbor, Chong, after the death of her husband and children, goes insane, similar to Hamlet and Ophelia at the deaths of their fathers. She is distraught, going through cycles of hysteria at the thought of her children, and periods when she talks to them as though they are still there. Hamlet does the same with his father’s death, believing he is seeing his ghost. 

I haven’t finished the book yet, though it is difficult to put down, so I will only write about a few key scenes that stood out to me, though really every scene is significant enough to write about. I cannot wait to finish it, so I can put all the different threads of thought and ideas together. 

I finished The Old Man and the Sea a while ago but never had the chance to write about it. The ending was sad, but realistic. As soon as the old man caught the fish, I immediately thought of all the blood spreading in the water, and knew the sharks would come just as surely as he knew. But I guess I always assume the worst, because I thought he would surely die coming back, and when he survived, even though the fish was destroyed, it was sort of a successful trip. But the definition of what was a successful trip changed during the journey. In the beginning the man let the fish pull him out without much worry, having plenty food and water and assuming the fish would soon tire and be caught. But as his water supply runs low and the fish stays strong, he begins to worry, but he never doubts his decision, and never thinks about going back. Turning back was all I could think about. From the moment he let the fish pull him out to sea, I was worried, but as he was an experienced fisherman, and I did not even know how big Cuba was, I trusted his judgment. I understand how once you start on something, and you’ve spent much time and energy on it, it would seem like such a waste of time and effort to stop when you have not finished. But in a case like this, alone in a small boat being pulled out to sea, old and weak, I would have cut my losses and turned back long before that thought even crossed the old man’s mind. But that is his nature as a fisherman, it is his living and he was determined, but also more than a little desperate to not come back empty-handed. I would have been more worried about coming back alive. But that is the nature of a fisherman; it is his whole life and purpose to catch fish. 

He overestimated his opponent, but even though the fish started out so much stronger, the old man was able to outlast it. It would seem as though the fish’s will to live was weaker than the man’s will to catch it, but that is basically his life. I think he felt that if he didn’t catch the fish he would not be able to survive, maybe not in the physical sense, but in some personal emotional sense. So his will was also to live, catching the fish is a crucial component to his life, and he felt that he could not live if he lost to the fish. The man’s will to live was more complex than pure survival, supposedly unlike the fish’s will, and his failure would lead to not only a physical death but also a worse emotional one. The man thinks a lot about wills, and who is stronger and more determined, and the man himself is not sure of the answer. Even after he has caught the fish, he wonders if it was all a dream, because the fish is so magnificent and enormous, and how did this weak old man bring him down. He wishes it had been a dream when the sharks come, and by the time he makes it back to the dock, it might as well have been. The fish is gone, only its skeleton remains, the only evidence of its magnificence, along with the old man’s injuries. 

At the end, the old man is in a state of defeat. His great accomplishment has been desecrated by the sharks, and both have destroyed him, physically and emotionally. But though he says he has run out of luck, as he lies on his mat, unable to get up, his very next sentence is planning the next outing with the boy, listing the new equipment he will need, and wanting the newspapers, presumably to discover the outcome on the baseball game. This is a fisherman. The old man has been out at sea for a week, battling the elements, an eighteen-foot fish, multiple sharks, and his own body’s failings, yet this does not set him back more than three days, and he is already preparing his next outing, because that is what a fisherman does. Just as the old man persevered on while the fish was pulling him at sea, so he perseveres through the repercussions of that act and continues on with his life, that is, with fishing. Another thing that stood out to me at the end of the novel was the sentence when the old man is explaining his injuries, and he says that he “felt something in my chest was broken”. This struck me as being metaphorical for his heart, and how it broke after he lost to the sharks, and lost his luckiness. 

Also at the very end, there are a couple of tourists looking down at the skeleton of the fish from a café, and think it is a shark. They remark that they didn’t realize how beautiful sharks were, when they misunderstand the waiter’s explanation of the type of fish. Their misunderstanding and ignorance angered me, because it was the sharks’ faults that this beautiful fish was floating in the ocean as “garbage”. Now I love sharks, but in this novel they are the obvious antagonists, destroying the fish and the old man. The old man loves the sharks as well, as he does all creatures of the sea, but that doesn’t mean he liked what they did to his fish, even if he understands why they did it. That the tourists would think that the beautiful thing was a shark, and not know that the sharks were actually what destroyed the beautiful thing, expresses their ignorance of such things, much like the ignorance of the reader at the beginning of the novel, not understanding the unique and intimate way of the fisherman. I feel like I still have so much that I could say about this novel, one idea can just go on forever, which I take as a sign of a great novel, so I might do another post later…

Cree en un maestro como en Dios mismo

This year in Spanish class we read El Almohadón de Plumas a short story by Horacio Quiroga. This is the second story I have read by Quiroga, the first being A la Deriva in last year’s Spanish class. Having studied both stories in class, I have seen the similarities of Quiroga’s writing style. Quiroga’s life was plagued with tragedy and death – by illness, murder, and suicide, including his own. Death is a major theme in his works, and it is always unexpected and unexplained. Bad marriages and illnesses are also prominent themes in both his life and his stories. Mrs. Lawless taught us about Quiroga’s life and the themes and styles of his stories before we read them, and that really helped me to recognize the important themes and more importantly why they were in there. Normally, you read a book and then afterwards you might look up the author’s life. Already knowing about Quiroga’s life, I noticed and understood why he wrote what and how he did. (Similarity – In Lit, we learnt about Zora Neale Hurston after reading Their Eyes Were Watching God. Knowing that Hurston was in part writing about her life experiences, I was able to recognize the similarities and understand the novel better.) Quiroga wrote a Decalogue, the Ten Commandments of the Perfect Storyteller. This was a list of rules that authors should follow to write a good story, like the Ten Commandments of being a good Jew or Christian (The first commandment is to believe in the master of writing as you would God). Having this list before I read his stories prepared me to look for these things to see if Quiroga followed his own rules, just as the list of themes allowed me to see which ones appeared.

In El Almohadón de Plumas (The Feather Pillow), the bad marriage of a newlywed couple leads to the sickness and death of the wife. The beginning of the story focuses on the marital problems of the couple, the husband is distant and cold and cannot express his feelings, and the wife is forced to give up her dreams and resign to her sad life. Quiroga himself had marital problems, his first wife committed suicide and his second wife took their child and left him. So it is evident why Quiroga would write about terrible marriages. The wife in the story becomes ill, deathly ill, and the doctor cannot figure out why. Two of Quiroga’s brothers died of Typhoid Fever, and he himself got cancer, which explains why his novels always involve an illness (In “A La Deriva” the man was poisoned by a snake). The wife in the story slowly dies, but it is not until after her death that it is discovered what was wrong with her. It turns out that there was an insect inside her pillow that was sucking her blood from her head every night as she lay in bed. And that is where the unexpected but never supernatural death occurs. Quiroga experienced many deaths in his life, his stepfather killed himself in front of Quiroga, Quiroga accidently killed his friend, and most unexpected was that he killed himself when he found out he had cancer. As the master of Latin American horror and suspense, much like Poe is in North America, Quiroga never ceases to surprise and terrify. The idea of a disgustingly swollen spider hiding inside your pillow sucking your blood is horrifying, and that is the exact idea that Quiroga leaves you with. The last line explains that these parasites can reach enormous proportions, prefer human blood, and are commonly found in feather pillows. It makes your spine crawl.

One of the Delalogue’s rules is in the importance of the first and last sentences. The first sentence of The Feather Pillow describes the conflicting feelings of the honeymoon, which gave the wife hot and cold shivers. It sets the stage for what is to come, the failing marriage. The last line of the story leaves the reader with a terrifying, paranoid, and disgusted feeling, afraid of a pillow. In A La Deriva, the first line starts the story suddenly – the man steps on something and receives a bite on the foot. It ends just as suddenly – he stops breathing. Another one of the commandments was to use a minimal amount of adjectives to describe the situation, and not more. A La Deriva did that in describing the man’s foot, saying it was swollen like a sausage. In a simple phrase Quiroga paints a picture of the effects of the poison, without any superfluous words. In The Feather Pillow the house is described as a palace, but empty. It takes a few sentences, but it thoroughly describes the appearance and feelings of the honeymoon cottage. I think that A La Deriva follows the commandments more closely. It uses fewer words, but still gets the point across, and the beginning and ending of the story are more eventful, sudden, and unexpected.

The parasite in The Feather Pillow is a symbol for the marriage. It is cloaked in the harmless pillow, but it is secretly sucking the life out of the wife, as literally as the marriage is sucking her life figuratively. The parasite sucks her blood and the marriage sucks her dreams, and both are killing her, physically and emotionally.  It was suggested that the husband might also be a symbol for the parasite, but I do not agree with that entirely. The husband loved his wife, he just could not express it, and while he was the reason the wife’s dreams were crushed, he didn’t kill her. I guess the marriage and the husband are pretty much the same thing, but I guess I find it harder to place the blame on the person than it is to place it on an abstract concept of marriage. The husband and the marriage was not meant to hurt the wife, but both did, just as the parasite did not suck her blood to kill her, it sucked to feed itself, killing her was the unavoidable result. The marriage did not mean to crush the wife’s dreams, it couldn’t help it, there was no way it could be avoided, with the husband’s personality being what it was - duro, hard.

 

ga niet zacht in die goede nacht

This was the other poem I was thinking about reciting for Poetry Out Loud, and while I did not choose it, I still really like the poem, especially when set to music by John Cale, so I thought I'd share it.