Many of you still need to write this week on the blog--tonight is your last night to do so and get credit for your weekly blog assessment.
You can either write on the previous prompts
OR
for those of you that prefer more literary analysis over self awareness--try this one on for size:
What is Paz talking about in his short story, "My Life with the Wave?" What is the wave?
Again, if anyone would like to meet with concerning your writing or our present condition, route, as a class, please feel free to email me in order to set up a time to talk.
Hoping everyone is having a nice snow/sleet/rain day.
See you tomorrow.
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4 comments:
The wave is a woman who he has an affair with. Much like the handout with the women and the sky. The wave falls in love with the man and the wave sucks in the persona of a woman taking all characteristics with it. The wave is supposed to represent the characteristics of woman in relationships in a mans point of view. This man sees women as demanding and lonely wanting and taking more. The man gets overwhelmed and instead of coping with his issues he runs from the problem. When he returns he sees that his wave is frozen and sells it and disappears from the picture. I think that the man was so needed that he needed to create a new woman, someone unique within the wave. I think that the wave represented not only woman but also him and what he wanted within a relationship. I think that once he realized what the wave really was he had to run because it was a mirror of himself. When he came back to see the wave frozen he saw it as a prime time to run. The new owner chopping the ice up and using it with drinks says that you can run but its never going to go away and someone else with find a new way to toy with your vulnerability.
I really liked this story. The combination of Paz’s metaphors and the style of his writing made ‘My life with the wave’ very poetic and understandable.
There is no doubt that ‘the wave’ is a woman. I think it’s pretty funny that Paz chose a wave to personify a woman because I imagine that in a relationship, most women probably seem like waves most of the time. This story is about relationships for me. It describes the connections, the sacrifices, the torture, and the anxiety that comes along with love. The narrator starts out by explaining the woman that this wave is portraying; a woman who seems carefree, yet very attached to him. As he empties the water-cooler on the train with her, he shows sacrifice, even humiliation in her behalf when he is assumed to be poisoning the passengers. He says, “Love is a game, a perpetual creation.” After this I started seeing all of the different ways the author visualized each circumstance…the beaches, the sunny days, the dark cloudy days, the fishes, the boats and the water. Through each of the woman’s moods and personality traits Paz uses these types of metaphors in order to explain the disjunction, and the struggle of each stage in their relationship. After seeing his wave with other men (the little ferocious fishes) the narrator discovers his love and care for the wave when he finally goes after the ‘horrible creatures.’ As the waves presence complicates and simplifies his life all at the same time, he is torn between life with and life without her. She is described laughing, screaming hugging, and hating with the constant mood fluctuations of a wave, and a typical woman. As the misunderstandings in their relationship and the inability to fully ‘reach the center of her being’ only leads to ‘the emptiness that sucked me in and smothered me,’ the narrator finds. As he returns home feeling independent he finds her statue and brings it to town to sell. After selling it he watches his customer chop her up into little ice cubes at a restaurant and realizes that it is not only the end of his relationship with this woman, this wave, but that maybe she was never a statue to him, only a pile of ice cubes, waiting to chill a bottle. From total infatuation to total despise, the narrator tells an underwater tale about the crazy extremes brought on by love.
Whenever the student body of the Upper School is planted firmly inside the assembly hall, you know you’re in for a rollicking, hand-clapping good time. Any announcement, be it a birthday or a recycling reminder, is followed by the familiar sound of some 550 hands sluggishly connecting, creating an early-morning cacophony. “Why do we clap for everything?” an assembly buddy recently asked me, to which I responded with a nonchalant shrug. The idea never really hit me that we do in fact clap for the most unnecessary reasons until then, and the round of applause that followed Ms. Mansfield’s announcement that her Euro class would be meeting in the library only reaffirmed it. The only reason I figure for why we do this is that we’re running on auto pilot; we’re bound by monotony. When we take away one of the clapping hands, we’re forced to mix things up- we’re literally jarred out of our usual routine. In straying from the norm, we find that things become much more valuable, because they require thought more than action.
To answer the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” I would reply that it is not a sound, but the feeling of being satisfied. I hate using the word satisfied because to me it brings up images of shrugging off an OK grade on a paper (saying “hey, It’s not that bad- I’m satisfied!”) or finishing a long meal and rubbing one’s tummy out of some gluttonous satisfaction. But I don’t want to go all thesaurus on you so “satisfied” will do (yes, I’m settling). The ensuing round of applause after a performance, speech or, in Berwick’s case, an announcement, lets the “performer” know they did a job well done!.. well, in theory. Since clapping has become such a reflex, it’s hard to tell when the applause is sincere, and not just another subconscious response. The sound of applause can be moving, but I’ve found in many cases it really means nothing. It’s a motion, and while it may give the performer a sense of pride or accomplishment, it fades away quickly. It’s a sound we’ll hear again, and a sound we’ll produce again. It’s overused and undervalued…we need a new way of praising.
Clapping with one hand is something that must be imagined, making it an inward idea. This relates to my ultimate point that it is a feeling, because it’s something that’s self-created. It’s a personal “applause,” one that matters because it’s coming from the performer themselves. What we think about ourselves matters so much more than the perception of a classmate or a stranger; an obvious example would be to make note of the people who aren’t always the most well liked, but are generally confident in who they are, and frequently enough find themselves clapping with one hand. I’d place myself in this category, and I think it’s the most common. However, there is another category of people who are well-liked and looked up to as good people, but inside they’re a crumbling mess of insecurity and self-loathing. In this case, the sound of the clapping doesn’t have any affect, because in the end, it’s the feeling of one hand clapping the resonates louder than any applause ever could.
"We all know the sound of two hands clapping but what is the sound of one hand clapping?"
This is one of those elementary philosophical questions that people get wrapped around and stuck on. It is similar to "If a tree fell in the forest and no one was around to hear it, would it make a sound?". Both of these questions are getting at the same general idea and that is the idea of how we, as humans, perceive the universe. More specifically, how weak and unreliable our senses are when it comings to judging the world around us. I want to take on this matter philosophically and then relate it to Borges.
To answer this question one would look to define the word clap, and then would probably say that clapping with one hand does not make a sound. But like Rene Descartes states in his meditations, one must look deeper before making these decisions. The definition of the word clap that is in the dictionary relies solely on our senses. When one claps two hands together there is an audible sound that one calls a "clap". When one moves one hand in the same motion that that hand would make in the process of clapping, there is no audible sound. Why is there a sound made when two hands clap together? The sound comes from the two objects colliding and producing the audible noise. But when one hand moves in a clapping motion, that hand also collides with particles even though they are much smaller. So when the hand collides with those particles, it makes a sound, it is just not audible to our weak and unreliable senses. So literally, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Well, I am not sure of that, but I do know that there is a sound.
Okay, now to stray from philosophy and move on to Borges. Forget everything I just talked about in the last paragraph and lets approach the question from a different mindset. When I read this topic the first thing I thought about it was the idea of the three worlds that we talked about with Borges. The first world in this situation would be our senses. That first world would tell us that the sound of one hand clapping does not exist. It would tell us that there is no sound. Our second world here would be the world of science and philosophy that I just went into in my last paragraph. The world that says there must be some sound produced and the reason that we do not hear it is because our senses are so weak. Since this question is so wide open and debatable, the third world is our imagination and it ultimately serves as the decision maker. It is up to the person who interprets the question to make his or her final decision on it. So when I combine my first and second worlds, it comes down to my opinion and my third world to come up with an answer to this question. To me, one hand clapping makes a sound, but to Borges or someone else, that answer could be completely different.
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