Thinking about Oz

When we discussed The Wizard of Oz in class on Tuesday, I could not stop thinking about a movie I had recently seen.  The Fall is a story about stories and reality.  Set in the 1920's, a little girl with a broken arm and a wild imagination makes friends with an injured man and he begins to tell her stories about mythical heroes.  Because of the man's drug induced, fractured state of mind and the girl's imagination, the line between reality and the story start to blur.  I will not say anything about the end but I think that this movie is very enjoyable and demonstrates seperation, initiation, and return. 

Red or Blue Pill

This information is from imdb.com: The book Neo hides his computer discs in is called "Simulacra and Simulation". The chapter where they're hidden called Nihilism. Nihilism often involves a sense of despair coupled with the belief that life is devoid of meaning.


This is the definition from dictionary.com for Simulacra: 

an image or representation of someone or something: a small-scale simulacrum of a skyscraper.

                                OR

an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute: a bland simulacrum of American soul music.

ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from Latin, from simulare

I found this subject interesting when we briefly talked about it in class.  I looked at some of the summaries of the ideology of the book 'Simulacra and Simulation' and I will post the main points below:

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:

1. The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct that, a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
2. The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully show us reality, but can hint at the existence of something real which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery".
4. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.

Myth is ever-present in our lives.  The theories of reality which are deeply analyzed in Baudrillard's theories can help us understand the symbols which create our reality are all mythological.  

9-20 Dionysus

As I have ventured into the first chapters of Calasso, I have found the tales of Dionysus very entertaining.  Dionysus has a sexual thirst for powerful women that simply can not be satisfied.  In order to seduce these women, he has discovered that wine is his new best friend.  Using an old frat-boy trick, Dionysus turns the a stream of water into wine; conveniently, Aura drinks from this stream and drinks till she drops.  Dionysus slips in a nooner and evacuates the area before she awakes.  He does not leave her a gift, nor does he promise to call her later.  

     Dionysus decides that he likes this act of rape-trickery and now focuses his attention on the huntress Nikaia.  "He had played the wine trick on her too, raped her in her sleep and deserted her just as he had Aura" (33).  Perhaps Dionysus had to rely on the wine act because he has some severe sexual frustrations, after all, "Dionysus's first love was a boy" (34).  Alcohol and sexual frustration can cause sticky situations, among gods and men.  

Thoughts about the first couple days

I have been thinking of a few different concepts about myth lately.  One of them is how the gods are always present.  In the world we live in, the decions of the gods or god explain events and situations we find ourselves in.  For those who do not believe in myth, or deny the existence of one or many gods, they turn to science.  Science has tried to replace the world of myth by explaining thins with mechanical and biological interactions.

Truth:  What makes a story a true story?  In myth, there are many different interpretations and versions of the same story.  Although some people believe that there is only one true version to a story, it is more important to focus on the multiplicity of stories.  In oral storytelling, what is not being said is just as important as what is said.  I feel that people search for fixated meanings, such as symbols, metaphors, all that crap, rather than thinking about the story through the eyes of mythology.  Besides, focusing on the solidity of a story is rather boring.