This blog has been relaunched!

Hello! You have reached the archive that is the original blogger website for my blog, Word For Sense and Other Stories. This blog has been relaunched, and you can now find my content on my WordPress website, www.word-for-sense.com

See you there!
Talia

Diet Racism in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice"

I haven't made a blog post in a while, and as I recall I promised to post essays I wrote for class. Unfortunately (from a blog reader's perspective) I am in writing-intensive classes, which fortunately (from my perspective) means that I get to re-write papers! As of yet I have not finished re-writing the essay I wanted to post, so instead of a proper essay, here is the contents of a forum post I made about Merchant of Venice for my Queer Readings class, contemplating historical difference:

In this short essay, I address a surprise I encountered in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and the questions, concerns, and parallels to modern culture I drew from it. The main surprise I encountered while reading Merchant of Venice was the casual racism of Portia. I knew before starting to read Merchant that it has rampant antisemitism, but I was not expecting additional racist remarks towards black folk. There is, of course, rampant racism in our own time and so the presence of it was not a true surprise, but rather the insidious way it was taken for granted was what startled me. 

After the Prince of Morocco chooses the wrong casket, Portia’s line upon his departure is “Let all of his complexion choose me so.” (II.vii.79) In the notes of my copy of the text (The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd Edition), there is a performance comment that notes how many directors cut this line in order that Portia appear as a more sympathetic character. This censure raises the question of how this is replicated in our contemporary culture.

The erasure of unsavory comments in not unlike what I have heard called “diet racism” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdyin6uipy4). That is to say, the person in question presents themselves as being accepting and encouraging of equality, but in actuality still holds racist beliefs and makes racist comments when not in the earshot of the person they are insulting,

Throughout scene seven, Portia makes no outward criticism about the Prince of Morocco, but as soon as he leaves she makes the disparaging comment about his complexion.   Five centuries after Shakespeare, we are still held subject to this casual racism, and so examining this lack of cultural difference by closely looking at Portia's language can help us understand the way in which we have constructed the casual racism that can be found in our own time and place.


Our own historical and cultural moment is different in that this casual racism is often secluded when present in media, unless the character in question is the villain of the piece. In contrast, Portia is one of the protagonists in Merchant and the audience is meant to sympathize with her. 

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Last week, my department had a screening of the documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"  by Werner Herzog. The documentary is centered around the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Said cave contains amazing works of prehistoric art, dating back over 30,000 years. It was in constant use for so long that some overlapping images are thought to have been painted with thousands of years between them.

Thanks for the cave's preservation are owed to a rock slide that buried the cave's original entrance, and kept the save in relatively perfect isolation until 1994, when the cave was discovered by Jean-Marie Chauvet (for whom the cave is named) and his two friends Éliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire. The cave has sustained some damage in that time - it is located near a large body of water, and some seepage has eroded some of the paintings, but overall the cave is incredibly intact.

I greatly enjoyed the film for a variety of reasons. Not only were the images of the cave itself beautiful, but the craft of the film was amazing. The film balances information with artistry in a way that made it so that I felt like I was learning and yet there was never a dull moment. The music throughout the documentary was eerie, and at times tense, but fit well with the overall thematic vibe of the film.

While the art that was intentionally painted in the cave is fantastic, almost as astonishing are the cascade of glittering calcite crystals, which not only form stalagmites and stalactites, but also coat many of the skulls and bones left behind from both rituals and the fact that the location functioned as a bear cave at some point in its history.

One line that stood out to me in the film was "We are locked in history. They were not." This line resonated with me quite deeply, as I have long wondered at the idea of preservation. So much of our time is spent preserving the past, that sometimes I wonder whether that is harmful to our present. While I feel that our history is important I also feel that by staying entrenched in the past can be damaging to our future. The constant struggle of innovation and tradition. I'm not sure what the answer is, or if there even is one. I'll let you know if I ever find it.

Cheers,

Talia

PS: If you would like to watch the film yourself, it is available on Netflix and Amazon Instant Video for purchase/rental and select subscriptions. If you are interested in learning more about the cave, and/or viewing images of the cave and its replica, I have pasted additional resources below.

https://www.ancient.eu/Chauvet_Cave/

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/chauvet/

Check-in 4

I originally intended for my next post to be another slightly more professional or academic one, but unfortunately the post ideas that I had fell through. In the next month or so you should expect to be reading sections of, if not the entirety of essays that I am writing for my various classes, so I decided that I would use this post as an opportunity to share what classes I am taking this semester in order to prepare my audience for future posts. I am taking five classes this semester: an astronomy course, yet another mythology course, a queer readings course, a course on European modernity, and a course on golden-age Spanish drama. So far its been fun, but also very busy, since I also have two jobs and other extra-curricular commitments.

I hesitate to put anything too personal on the internet, but there was also a death in my family of someone I was quite close to as a child. Life is precious, and so I have been spending time in the company of those that I love, and doing my best to enjoy every moment I can with my friends and family while we are all together on this earth, because one never really knows what day will be their last.

Best wishes to you all,
Talia

Translation of Neruda's Sonnet 88 (LXXXVIII) from 100 Love Sonnets (Cien sonetos de amor)

The following is a translation I did of Neruda's Sonnet 88 (LXXXVIII) from his Cien sonetos de amor (100 Love Sonnets). I've pasted the original below my translation. Please let me know what you think, especially if you are a fellow Spanish speaker/translator!

LXXXVIII (English, My Translation)
The month of March returns with hidden light
and boundless fish slide through the heavens
blurred earthly vapors stealthily progress,
one by one all things fall into silence.

In this crisis of erring atmosphere, through luck,
you collected the lives of the sea with those of the fire;
gray movement of the vessel of wintertime,
the figure that love brought to the guitar.

Oh love, rose soaking from sirens and foam,

the fire dances and ascends unseen stairs
and wakes the blood in insomniatic tunnels

so that waves may consume themselves in the heavens,

the sea forget its riches and its lions,
and the world plummet into dark deceit.

LXXXVIII (Spanish, Original) 
El mes de Marzo vuelve con su luz escondida
y se deslizan peces inmensos por el cielo,
vago vapor terrestre progresa sigiloso,
una por una caen al silencio las cosas.

Por suerte en esta crisis de atmósfera errabunda
reuniste las vidas del mar con las del fuego,
el movimiento gris de la nave de invierno,
la forma que el amor imprimió a la guitarra.

Oh amor, rosa mojada por sirenas y espumas,
fuego que baila y sube la invisible escalera
y despierta en el túnel del insomnio a la sangre

para que se consuman las olas en el cielo,
olvide el mar sus bienes y leones
y caiga el mundo adentro de las redes oscuras 

Desire and Its Cost

The following is from an essay I wrote in Spring of my sophomore year for my Introduction to Global Literature course. I was going through my files on my computer and re-read the essay in a fit of nostalgia. Having decided that it was a shame to let it languish in my cloud, I elected to post it here. I have very little knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita beyond what we read in class, and I have yet to read the entirety of the Mahabharata, so if anyone with more knowledge wants to weigh in on what is in this paper PLEASE do so. I don't want to impose on anyone else's culture, so reach out and let me know what you think! I will edit this post as-needed. :)

Desire and Its Cost

Talia Franks

COML 100A: Introduction to Global Literature

March 31 2016

Can one attain their desires without succumbing to negative emotion?    

To begin, what is desire? More than needing to use the bathroom after a long car ride, or wanting a cold drink after working in the hot sun all day, the desire we speak of now is of the deeper sort. A longing for something. For wealth, for power, for fame, for glory, for companionship. And the question is whether or not once one gets that, is it enough? Beyond desire’s definition, what are the consequences of desire once it is fulfilled or unfulfilled, especially to those that surround us? To look at it from a critical perspective, let us examine desire from the perspective of texts from two different cultures: The Bhagavad Gita from India, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales from Germany, specifically the tales The Fisherman and His Wife and Rumpelstiltskin.

 The Bhagavad Gita warns that desire is a perilous emotion that will lead to destruction, and urges us to cast desire off. In the Gita Arjuna is warned of the dangers of attachment to senses:

(62) Let a man [but] think of the objects of sense―attachment to them is born: from attachment springs desire, from desire is anger born. (63) From anger comes bewilderment, from bewilderment wandering of the mind from wandering of the mind destruction of the soul: once the soul is lost the man is lost.[1]

This attachment is presented as creating the desires that are so dangerous for us and that ultimately cause us to lose ourselves.

The link of attachment to desire is notable; however, the further connection from desire to anger is far more interesting. This link exists because desire causes stress regardless of whether that desire is fulfilled. A person who has achieved their desire yearns for more, acquiring the sin of greed until they can no longer have what they desire; while a person who has missed their desire devolves into anger at their lack. We can examine whether or not this is true through the lens of two other texts we investigated in class, the fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, The Fisherman and His Wife and Rumpelstiltskin.

In The Fisherman and His Wife a poor fisherman and his wife Isabel live in a hovel, where she stays during the day while he goes to catch fish. The fisherman is content with this life, but Isabel is not, and has desires beyond it. Therefore, when the fisherman catches a fish that claims to be an enchanted prince and lets it go free, Isabel has a different reaction and, emboldened by her desire, demands that the fisherman go back and ask the fish-prince to give them a cottage that is nicer than the hut where they live. Her desire has given her motivation and cunning beyond what the fisherman has because her desire enables her to think creatively. In this the brothers are teaching a lesson of how desire can help people achieve their dreams, while contentment stagnates. However, they counterbalance that message by having the wife overreach herself. Isabel grows more and more greedy, becoming first a Queen, then Pope, and finally she wants to control the sun, at which point she is reduced to once more living in a hovel.[2]

The story of the fisherman's wife indirectly parallels the teachings of the Gita, but diverges from them in ways that point towards a more nuanced understanding of desire. Isabel has forgotten where she started in life due to her greed, as her desire for more power has clouded her judgment. This is in alignment with the Gita; however, Isabel nevertheless does achieve her dreams to a certain extent before she goes to an extreme beyond the realm of possibility. The fisherman, by contrast, is almost entirely free of desire, and of both its constructive and destructive consequences. On the one hand, he is portrayed as being at peace with himself and with the state of his life, exactly as the Gita teaches one will become if one withdraws from desire. On the other hand, he is an almost entirely passive character with no goals or potential for growth. His lack of desire for a changed life would have seen them live in the hovel for their lives, never taking the opportunity of the wish. Additionally, the one desire he does have in the story, to stop his wife from asking the fish-prince for more power[3], he never acts on and so she is never stopped and they return to living in the hovel.

From this we can see that the fault of the return to the hovel cannot be placed solely on the wife. Although she had the initial desire, the action could never have been carried out if the fisherman had acted on his own desire to stop her. Therefore, we can argue that ignoring desire entirely can be just as dangerous as acting on it recklessly.

If the fisherman had acted on that desire to stop her, and helped Isabel to learn to control her own desires, their desires could have counterbalanced one another. So although the Gita claims that all desire leads to anger and eventually loss of self, one can argue that desires do not have to lead to this unfortunate fate as long as they are balanced by a sense of realism and the ability to know when to act on them and when to listen to the advice of others.

The majority of the issue with the fisherman and his wife was the lack of a personal connection between them. Isabel had her attachment to the material that caused her desire, and the fisherman was unable to stop her because they lacked attachment to one another. To argue against the Gita, Isabel and the fisherman’s detachment from each other and lack of active engagement in each other’s and their own lives was what caused their lack of mutual desire and control of desire, and with an attachment, their desires could have led to a more satisfactory outcome.

To examine another work concerning desire, we turn to Rumpelstiltskin. In this tale, Rumpelstiltskin’s interaction with desire, namely his desire for the Queen's child, parallels what we have observed in the Gita. His desire for the child, and his anger at not receiving the child, led to such anger that he harmed himself.[4] His greed, in assuming that the child would be his, also leads to foolishness, another symptom of the cycle described in the Gita.

The Miller’s daughter/Queen’s interaction with desire tells a different story, however.  In the beginning, it shows selfish desire causing harm to another; her desire to save her own life causes her to sacrifice the potential life of her first born child. However, once the child is born she has a change of heart and her desire to save her child from an unknown fate with Rumpelstiltskin supersedes her past selfish desire. The tale thus shows us how desire can be born out of concern for the well-being of others, not just out of selfishness.

This desire strengthens resolve and provides great motivation when she needs to discover Rumpelstiltskin’s name.[5] The Queen’s desire to keep her child was ultimately what kept her child safe from Rumpelstiltskin, and after he left, she was left in peace, as far as the reader knows.

So while these tales do tell us that just as the Gita warns, no good seems to come from untempered desire and harm is definitely done to those who desire and those who surround those who submit to their desires, there is also a deeper message that desire is a motivator and an inspiration for achieving a higher life status, when approached with a sense of moderation.

This moderation is a key point that the Gita fails to address. The tales, on the other hand, offer a more detailed exploration of what forms of desire are healthy or unhealthy. The Brothers Grimm are not advocating for a total lack of desire, as does the Gita, but for this continued theme of moderation. When the fisherman and his wife first upgrade to a cottage with a large garden, they have the following interaction:

“See!” said the wife, “is this not charming?”

“Yes,” said her husband,” so long as it blooms you will be well content with it.”[6]

These lines caution that as long as we are content with what we have, we will need nothing else. It is a consideration not as strong in the Gita, but still one that overlaps. In the Gita there is a strong focus on the soul and maintaining the connection to oneself, while The Brothers Grimm allow for a focus on the material in a broader sense. The fairy tales caution against desire by showing a loss of the material when desire is allowed in excess, while the Gita appeals to our desire for a complete and peaceful soul. While the Gita teaches us to renounce our desires in order to achieve a complete and peaceful soul, the fairy tales teach us that desire can be integrated into an emotionally fulfilling life, as long as it is not allowed to go out of control.

 The Fisherman and His Wife is definitely an example of an unhealthy relationship with desire, while Rumpelstiltskin says beautiful things about the way that desire can be harnessed when born out of love, which is what is lacking in the relationship shown in the first tale. What we can glean from that is that desire is a thing of value, but only when people and their love is the cause.

Bibliography

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. 2003. "Rumpelstiltskin." In Grimm's Fairy Tales, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Anonymous, 241-243. New York: Barnes & Noble Books.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. 2003. "The Fisherman and His Wife." In Grimm's Fairy Tales, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Anonymous, 105-109. New York: Barnes & Noble Books.

Zaehner, R. C., trans. 1969. The Bhagavad Gita. Glasgow: Oxford University Press.

---

[1]Zaehner 52

[2] Grimm and Grimm, The Fisherman and His Wife, 106-109

[3] Ibid, 107

[4] Grimm and Grimm, Rumpelstiltskin, 243

[5] Ibid.

[6]Grimm and Grimm, The Fisherman and His Wife, 106

18 Resolutions for 2018

So it's been a while. Last semester… last semester was tough for me. And while the holidays were a nice break, things were stressful in their own way. As it stands, I am wading in to the depths of my last semester as an undergraduate, and that is both terrifying and exciting. This semester I am taking five classes, volunteering, and I still have those two jobs, so I'm living a pretty busy life these days. A busy life, but (I hope) a happy one. As it stands, we're already a whole two weeks into the new year, but I have yet to share my resolutions. Now I know that 'New Year, New Me' rarely works, and I get that. Even so, I'm pasted below the changes big and small that I want to make to my life:

18 Resolutions for 2018 (in no particular order)

1. Start running again
2. Read at least one non-academic book a month
3. Read at least 18 non-academic books total
4. Exercise 4-6 days per week
5. Focus on learning more than grades
6. Complete all assignments on time
7. Set aside time to write every week
8. Eat a balanced diet
9. Buy ugly fruits and veggies
10. Follow a regular sleep schedule
11. Spend more time with friends and family
12. Save up money for a new computer
13. Take shorter showers
14. Improve time management
15. Write a minimum one blog post per month
16. Donate one third of my personal library
17. Reach out to those I disagree with
18. Do what I can to bring happiness to the world

Cheers,
Talia