Heroes and Mystics 2022

      So yesterday I talked about how musicals are a great way of depicting the hero's journey, and I wanted to elaborate on that with a specific example of a musical that literally includes the elements of the hero's journey as plot points. The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals is a musical on youtube produced by Starkid Productions. The story centers around Paul, an average man who does not like musicals. Trouble occurs when a meteor crashes into town carrying an alien goo that is slowly turning everyone into a musical hive mind alien.      What makes the show so interesting is how self aware it gets with the hero's journey. The show opens with a song about the hero, Paul, but after that there isn't a song for the next 10-15 minutes. The singing occurs after the meteor has hit, and unlike in most shows, everyone is aware of the singing. When Paul first interacts with the aliens, they attempt to get him to sing with them about how nice the day is and how good h...

    I was walking to my dorm room while listening to music and I came to a realization that I just had to write about.  After writing my Campbell essay on probably the most outrageous movie I could possibly think of (Shark Boy and Lava Girl will always be near and dear to my heart), I've realized that the formula for the hero's journey can be applied to almost any kind of story.      On the way back to my dorm I happened to be listening to the soundtrack for Beetlejuice the Musical, and I noticed that not only were the songs going through Lydia's progression through the hero's journey, but many of the songs represented specific stages in the hero's journey. Say My Name is Lydia's call to action and refusal of the call as Beetlejuice tries to convince her to say his name. Day-O is supernatural aid as Lydia uses Adam and Barbara, her ghost friends, to possess her dad and businessmen. Day-O also contains the bellyof the beast as Lydia, in desperation due to he...

  A tree has the possibility of following the heroes journey. while it is incredibly unlikely, it is entirely possible that a tree can follow the heroes journey.  call to adventure- being planted  refusal of the call-sometime when a tree is first planted it needs a bit of encouragement to live. sometimes you feel like you are trying to keep the thing alive against its wishes.  mentor- person growing the tree, or Mother Nature  threshold- when the tree finally starts setting roots and growing  tests- Mother Nature, storms, lack of sunlight, being damaged or having animals burrow into it  innermost cave- typically a marge storm almost uprooting the tree  supreme ordeal- t ypically a marge storm almost uprooting the tree  reward- if the tree makes fruit it will bloom at this point  we spoke a few classes ago about the worm and the wasp constantly trying to complete an objective, and I keep thinking about how yo...

  Right before the school year began, I watched Interstellar for the first time. That movie has stuck with me for many reasons since–its plot is immaculately built to be both surprising and coherent and its writing is gorgeously true to the conversational behavior of humans writ large. The real reason I’ve fixated on it as a work, though, is its use of symbols. Interstellar is first and foremost a story–it ticks all the boxes of the archetypal hero’s journey. What’s so striking is that it’s accurate . To the letter. Every bit of the movie is built not just to be plausible, but outright possible. Space is silent. Black holes look like warped light waves (that are actually a star the last moment before it imploded). And somehow, these real facets of our galaxies and universe convey a symbolic meaning just from a glance. The wormhole becomes a threshold–the strange planets the trials–the black hole the dark night of the soul and the place of death and rebirth. To some of my pee...

I found some of the discussions over the past week confusing, partly because of the definitions used was only partially clear to me, so when I tried to analyze it further I was met with a roadblock. Ive decided to include definitions for some of the examples used in class for my own sake in case I forget and need to look back at this, as well as for others.  Simile of the line-p lato-  This is  an analogy that Plato uses to distinguish among different forms of knowledge and truth . Plato's basic division is between what is visible and what is intelligible (i.e., knowable, but not seen), with the visible portion smaller than the intelligible portion.-  https://psych.athabascau.ca/html/History/demo_glossary.cgi?mode=history&term_id=836&color_id=1 Xeno’s pa radox-  Zeno's paradoxes of motion are  attacks on the commonly held belief that motion is real , but because motion is a kind of plurality, namely a pr...

During the September 6th lecture it was briefly discussed the relation between mythos, logos, and the human psyche. Logos was stated to be a sort of "world labeling" wherein elements of the natural world identified and knowledge is created while Mythos is the practice of "world making" or creating universes for the purposes of story telling. Both are methods of meaning making, and the present goal is to contextualize them in Joseph Campbell's theory of the monomyth, which deals greatly with both, to elucidate further  their reciprocal relationship. First it must be recognized that mythos and logos are not concepts that exist outside of the human experience: they are both entirely constructed ideas that we apply to information we receive. We will start with mythos' relation to logos. Mythos, in the context of our current class can be described broadly as the entire process by which human cultures create myths, and cultures and individuals consume, interpret,...

Went a little overboard on the discussion last time (don’t worry–more like that will inevitably show up) so today’s topic is a little shorter and sweeter. I brought up in my first post that the importance of symbols stretches beyond the confines of merely narrative and philosophy. Symbols have also made a great splash in Rhetoric (courtesy of some theories of Kenneth Burke) and my own, personal, homeland: Computer Science. For this discussion, I’ll be focusing on symbols a la Plato–as a means to convey truths about objects that are more real than the individual can perceive. Rhetoric loves this idea. It adopts it wholeheartedly and raises it very nearly as one of its own. The art of argumentation is all about perspective–what you choose to highlight will consequently conceal other perspectives. Thus, the selection can often be considered a rhetorical device–a symbol that represents that argument in that moment. Rhetoricians use this to establish commonality between audience and s...

A brief note: I'm not trapped in time two to three weeks behind the rest of the class--it just took a while for me to figure out how to get my blogger account up and running. I'll be posting three separate blogs rapid-fire over the next three days. The key to our first few weeks of discussion on Heroes and Mystics has been the art, significance, and meaning of symbols. This focus has, in some ways, been a celebration of the wonderful complexity of human interpretation and communication; it has also, simultaneously, been a point of struggle for me.  The wonderful parts of symbols: Symbols are terribly important–pervasive of human life and indicative of truths that transcend any one culture. Love, forgiveness, aspiration and achievement, community, purity, etc. ad nauseum. And they are so integral to the human experience that they transcend any one field as well. I’m in a class on rhetoric, and Kenneth Burke–a key figure in that realm of academia, also values them to an extrao...

Page 4 Michael Taussig would suggest Juan's understanding of the meaning of a place emerges out of the process of an imitation of all the “differences” that we discern there. We mimic (in language and action) the full range of sounds, movements, and other sensory perceptions that come to us from the more than human world.” It’s hard to put a place that strikes us as sublime into mere words; we can try to describe it as a feeling and try to put language to that feeling, but sometimes the feeling of the beauty of nature or the power of a sacred space is too big to try to translate or make sense of. Would every place and experience be subjective, and would the discourse be the same? Would the mountain top make me feel the same as another? Or does my personal experience with the natural world and divine keep it intimate/ unique, or would my experience be relatable enough? The author uses the messiness, ambiguity, and mystery of people's deeply personal experience of place. I love t...

 Aug 30th  "every animal is in the world like water in water" in class Dr Redick used a story of a worm/wasp behavior being compared to OCD which I feel isn't fair, maybe it would be closer to reproduction, as it is an intentional action (unlike breathing) but is a driving force by our very nature.  Sometimes a journey isn’t yours to choose. Any kind of healing journey- physical or mental journey. Physical health journeys typically take others with you. The reason I came to this school is because its closer to home because my father is on a medical journey. within the past year, he has had a heart attack, quadruple bypass, 4 amputations, COVID, C-Diff (dysentary), loss of vision in one eye, full sepsis spending to his brain, 3 vascular angioplasty, 1 vascular bypass in the leg, and CLL. he was very close to death multiple times while was in college in NY. that forced my mother an I on a different journey that we did not choose, but quickly became necessary. For my mother,...