Searching Buddha

I love Kafka. I always have, perhaps because I adore magical realism. Still, I struggled a bit with these stories because they were so fantastical. I had the easiest time with The Judgement, which is why I chose it to focus on in class.

The image that I chose in class to focus on was the dirty underwear. To me, the dirty underwear initially signified neglect, aging, the loss of dignity and respect. However, the reaction of the son is more important here. His feelings of guilt at allowing his father's underwear to become dirty override any effect on the father. He feels guilty because he hasn't been taking the proper care of his father. It also reveals that he's not sure about how his father (his past) will fit into his future (his wife), because he says that he hadn't thought previously about what would happen to his father when he moved in with his wife, but he supposed he would have to bring him with him, now that he's seen the dirty underwear.

When I brought in Hartmann, I could see that Georg was struggling with emotions that weren't immediately evident due to Kafka's matter-of-fact style. We can see that Georg is anxious over this big change in his life and he has a fear about being unable to provide. This goes beyond his father and also applies to his wife. The dream also lets him figure out what to do with his father, so it provides some problem-solving and reveals the anxiety about providing for his wife.

Of course, since we don't know Georg as a human being, we're just making guesses here, so it's hard to know if we're right.

But still, thinking about the story in this way makes Georg's suicide at the end of it make sense. It seemed completely random until I started thinking about what was going on in Georg's head and could see this anxiety revealed by the dirty underwear. Perhaps focusing on other details in the story would give a different reading?
From a literary sense, I then understood why the protagonist kills himself at the end.

I recently was given a choice between two jobs. After a lot of turmoil and negotiation, I decided to stay at my current job. This process went on for about two weeks and was really stressful.

Last night, I dreamt that I went back to the job that I turned down and asked them for another chance to come work for them. In my dream, I was horrified that I was doing this, because I knew that it was going to make me feel awful.

I walked into my office, where one of my coworkers was playing at a Playstation console right next to my desk. He was playing Diablo, but a version that I'd never seen and wanted to play. I pulled out a dog sweater that I was knitting in a deep blue and then realized that someone had blocked the entrance into my office and now I was stuck.

I woke up, feeling panicked and unsure about whether or not I really had gone back to the bidding company. After a few moments, logical thought took over and I realized that it had been all a dream, but those first few moments were enough to make my stomach turn with stress.

I almost feel as if we should be comparing Ratey and Hobson, rather than Hartmann and Hobson. The big difference between them was, I think, that Hobson focuses on how we dream and Hartmann focuses on why we dream.

Being far more interested in the why, I have to admit that I remember Hartmann a lot better. Hobson seemed almost like a review of Ratey in some ways, with more emphasis on dreaming.

I did find the section with the related imagery particularly interesting, especially after having read Freud. It's almost as if free association has been taken to the extreme, but without the emotional context. Images are just images and relate to other images, all neatly explained away by dopamione and seratonin.

James Sully seems to be incorporating just about everyone we've studied, from a time long before they wrote.

He wants a neuroscientific way of explaining dreams, while also addressing them from a psychological perspective. He sees them as a way of getting at hidden feelings and, interestingly, even personalities.

He's furthest from Freud and rejects wish fulfillment in every dream although he sees some dreams as having an element of that. He is also suspicious of unchecked free association.

But unlike those we've studied, he also focuses on the actual pleasure of dreaming. He writes, "Whatever the moral dignity of these dream-disclosures may be, there is no doubt as to their having at their best a high hedonic and aesthetic value." Sully reminds us that dreams can be fun!

And now for one of those tedious dreams we've been reading about.

I was at work and I was migrating data for a huge project that we just migrated to new servers this weekend. To do this, we had to run a script over and over, so in my dream I just clicked buttons for what seemed like hours on end.

Barely a dream at all, really, since that's pretty much what the actual work was like, too. However, in the dream, I was in a different office and was wearing no shoes.

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (1483-1520)
(school of): Stories of Jacob: The Dream of Jacob (Vision of Ladder). Fresco.
Location :Logge, Vatican Palace, Vatican State
Photo Credit : Scala / Art Resource, NY

This image depicts the Biblical story of Jacob's vision of the ladder. Information about the Biblical story can be found here.

The dream of Nebuchadnezzar: The Tree. Mozarabic Bible, folio 319. Spanish, 10th c.
Location :S. Isidro el Real, Leon, Spain
Photo Credit : Giraudon / Art Resource, NY

This painting dates back to the 10th century - artist unknown.

I am in a court costume and I am in the gardens of Versaille. I enter a building, where my sister is attending Marie Antoinette. She and the other ladies are putting on a play of their own devising. I sit in the back of the room, arranging my skirts around me, so that I can watch.

My sisters heads backstage and while poised in the door, she utters a treasonous comment about Marie Antoinette. Suddenly, the entire room freezes and Marie Antoinette comes out in a rage and puts my sister into a torture device on the right-hand side of the room. It looks like a tanning bed and it's magnetic and it holds her with her arms held out in a cross. I am crying and screaming to let her go, but she stays in the device, frozen in space and time.

Suddenly I'm in modern clothing, in an airport hallway. My plane to Portland, Oregon is at 10 a.m., but I'm not packed and my things are scattered across the hall. I realize that it's 9:57 and I'm going to miss my plane. My father shows up and I'm screaming for him to help me get my stuff together, because I'll never make it and I'll have to explain to my best friend why I didn't get to visit her again. Eventually I abandon my stuff, hug my father and tell him I love him and then race through security.

But it's not that easy - two bossy women with long braids stop me and insist that I must be searched. They wave the wand over me as I watch my plane pull away from the gate through the window of the airport.

I awake, mouth dry and heart pounding.

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Dreamer analysis: I'm not sure about the Versaille bit (other than that we did a skit in class last night, which involved a play), but I am going to Portland this weekend. The last time I tried to visit my best friend, my plane was cancelled and I couldn't get on another one for two days, so I didn't make it out to visit. My plane does leave at 10 a.m. on Friday. I also talked to my dad yesterday and we always end our conversations by saying "I love you", so that's consistent too.

Given that a few people chose the Fuseli on the cover of our book, I thought I'd also share this Fuseli painting, which is his most (in)famous work:

The Nightmare
(1781)

(Detroit Institute of Art)

Generally the analysis of this painting is of a woman in the throes of a violently erotic dream (the imp on her pelvis). The mare in the background is literally, the night mare that brings the dream.

Fuseli would be a great topic for anyone interested in a painter that dealt with themes of dreaming over and over again.

I'm on a foreign planet and everything is alien around me, except for a man that I have a romantic attachment to. He's been here for a while longer than me; in fact, it becomes clear that I've come to the planet looking for him. The place itself is beautiful. We're in a clearing, but there are forests nearby of trees.

Yet, I know that in the forests are the aliens that are not friendly to us, so while they're beautiful to look at, I know I can't go there. I also know that even if I did go there, there would be nothing to eat.

In fact, eating is kind of a problem on this planet. As the man explains to me, the only way that we can eat is to lay belly down on the ground and eat the membrane on the ground. He spends much of the dream doing this, but I refuse to. I'll just wait for more appropriate food, I tell him, rather than debasing myself into eating mucus.

As I sit and wait (and I am dressed strangely - like a Robin Hood, with thigh-high boots, leggings and a tunic), two armies approach from either side of me. I hide with the man underneath a rock and we peer out as the aliens from the forest approach, armed with shields and swords. Their enemy comes from the other side and there's a huge battle, which we watch for a while.

Then we're back on earth, in a laboratory with a scientist that is more an idea than an actual man. I realize that the planet we have been on is a creation that is held into space by a long string that ends in his laboratory. Apparently we have shimmied down the string to visit. It's just that I know that I have to go back soon...

Note: I have a cold at the moment, which might explain snot-like imagery. :)

I read both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea while thinking about the Modern Lit class I took this summer, which focused on the effects of colonialism. So while it isn't an official critical lens, I'm going to look at them in that sense.

Much like with the triangle trade, you have the love triangle of Antoinette\Bertha, Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre. Antoinette\Bertha is basically used up and then discarded, as in the colonies. She suffers immensely, loses touch with reality and is renamed, all of which directly translates to the experiences of both the enslaved brought from Africa and the native peoples of the Americas. But I think Jean Rhys wants you to see all of that.

More interesting is the way that this applies to Jane Eyre, which was not written with the effects of colonialism in mind. Yet we still see the same themes in the live triangle, but this time the colonies are something foreign and wild, uncontrolled. The colonies are not prim and proper and disciplined like a proper Christian, an ideal human, should be. An interesting addition to this is how St. John is off to India, another British colony, to perform missionary work. Jane knows that he is off to seek his death, because India is another place that is wild and untamed, dangerous, wild and uncontrolled. And Jane is right - India does kill him. There seems to be a general mistrust of the colonies, as valued as they were for the material goods that they provided.

Both novels comment pretty deeply on what a huge impact colonialism had on both the colonized and the colonizer. It's far more obvious in Wide Sargasso Sea, but even Jane Eyre mentions it in two parts, which is significant, since Bronte could easily have left them out of the plot and had her characters that needed to be from/go to places far away go somewhere in Europe just as easily. But she doesn't - she chooses to focus on colonies as untamed places where madness, licentiousness and death endanger good Christians.