Amie

I’m pretty sure that yesterday was the most amazing class I’ve ever had. While we were frolicking around in the creek, I kept thinking that maybe I ought to sit down with my anthology and my spiral and write something profound and insightful and that I ought to let my heart be moved by the experience … but I didn’t. We, in a sense, were given permission to "waste time exploring" (Codger 424). So, I laughed at Chris when he slipped on algae, and I marveled at the fact that not only did Will climb the tree – he took his backpack up there with him and wrote while sitting on a tree limb. I made a sad attempt at skipping rocks on the water, squealed like an obnoxious little girl when I saw fish (sorry guys), we had leaf races, and I noticed that Katie had sprawled out on a rock for a nap. Basically, I just had fun for a while.

This sounds awfully non-Plan II, I know, but yesterday I just really didn’t feel like thinking. I’m sort of tired of having my mind blown by new theories and significant ideas. Spending an hour playing was very appealing to me. So now I’m starting to think that maybe we take this education thing too seriously.

I mean, we disdain our "overcrowded, noisy, haste-harried, greed-ridden, indifferent-seeming society," but are we really all that different from the senseless masses who bustle about in the chaos (Codger 424)? It seems to me that the main goal of our honors liberal arts education is to cause us to view society in a manner that allows us to stand outside it, reflect upon it, and glean truth and insight that allows us to improve it. I feel, though, as if I’ve spent more time in the past two months thinking about due dates than I have about what I’m learning. Perhaps this is just the idealistic part of me talking, but I’d kind of hoped to change the world during my first semester of freshman year. Is that asking too much? I mean, don’t get me wrong, spending hours on Logic problem sets has definitely altered my soul, as did that presentation by the Undergraduate Writing Center (direct quotes from the lecture: "Party people don’t outline their papers." "You’re freshmen, you’re busy with … your first tender sexual encounters; we know that you’re not always going to get your papers written early." But let’s loose ourselves in a tangent). I just haven’t undergone the mind-blowing transformation from my "half-forgotten origins" to the new world I expected to find when I went to college (430).

I know this doesn’t really seem like a journal on my place in time or space. Thus far, you’re right, it’s not. I’m pretty much just venting my frustrations with life and choosing a major and picking a fifth stinking class to take next semester. Bear with me.

I’ve been thinking lately about how easy it is to lose your life to the millions of "progressive mutilations" in life "which finally add up to [insert any adjective here] suicide" (429). When we get stressed out about a paper, and snap at our roommate, we’re valuing that paper more than that person. When I flip out about how to prove that some statue of Michaelangelo’s is not identical to a lump of clay by indirectly proving its non-identicalness, I’m letting my homework control my life. When I consistently get three hours of sleep a night, even though I’m managing my time decently, not only does it feel gross; it’s also an indicator that maybe it’s time to just stop studying.

I’ve been thinking lately that maybe life doesn’t have to be as complicated as we make it. Maybe we don’t have to be perfect, after all. Maybe it’s time that we take off our high heels and loafers and "rediscover our feet" (427). Maybe it’s time that we bow from our intellectual pedestals – the ones that boast that 74% of us were in the top 5% of our graduating class in high school – and realize that at this point in life, no one cares what our grades were or what we were involved in or what our history is. What matters is the people that we are, now, without explanation and without context. We stand alone in this world, on this campus. The space we have is the space we make for ourselves. Our time here is negligible, unless we find a way to stop time with some feat or great deed.

That’s why I don’t feel guilty about poking around in the creek yesterday. No, I wasn’t thinking deeply … actually, I wasn’t thinking at all. But I was enjoying the creek – and isn’t that part of the reason it’s there in the first place? I don’t want to just use the earth to inspire me to write journals or papers that are going to earn me a lot of points. I want to enjoy the earth. Maybe I’ll be changed by it somehow, maybe I won’t. But no matter the outcome, at least I will have enjoyed the earth.

There’s a lot to be learned from scholastic study; I’m not going to lie, yesterday I spent an hour researching ATP motors just because I was curious about them. I know, deep down, that this confounded Logic class is shaping my ability to think and reason. But I think there’s also a lot to learned in just living.

Last week one of my favorite fellow Plan II students mentioned to me that their life was a pattern of "hardcore studying, hardcore partying," and that they’d failed to take any personal time to just explore and create and enjoy being alive. I’ve felt the same way. I study. I play. When does the learning and living come in? How do we expect to gain anything from earth’s "therapy" if we haven’t even figured out what the crisis is (422)?

All around me, I see people living. Have they got it all figured out? Doubtful. But they’re letting themselves live and breathe, and they’re giving themselves permission to exist. These people seen like the kind who would unabashedly place "Vanity Fair & alternately War & Peace" on their coffee table (Oliphant 439). There’s nothing wrong with War & Peace, so long as you don’t loose the ability to appreciate sitting down and flipping through The Very Hungry Caterpillar. There’s nothing wrong with working hard for an A in a Plan II course, so long as we remember that the A is only a grade, not the goal of an education.

It seems to me that our place in space and time is what we make it out to be … and lately, I haven’t been making enough of mine.

Journal #12: Our Totem Animals

Our “totemic community”[1] loves the longhorn.

We love the “home creature”[2]

We want to latch on to something – to find “querencia”

and when we think we’ve found it,

We cling to it[3]

Cowboys, rustic and mysterious, ride high upon their mustangs.

Night herders sing lonely songs on their slow-walking horses[4]

Ambling ‘round the range

Glorified in their old-fashioned lifestyle

We search for a totem to revere,[5]

long for “strong attachments” to an “accustomed home,”[6]

attempt to use the “transporting power of imagination”[7]

To distract us from what is real.

We set up totems, arrange our teepees around them,

And pray empty prayers to the deities we’ve made for ourselves.

Our rain dances are in vain

“The earth does not think and does not care what people think.”[8]

I watched you raise up your totem

The one you’d carved with blistered, work-work hands.

And though I shed a tear for your folly

and for my loneliness, for you forgot me when you raised your pole,

I remembered that “I myself” at times had “seen and chased more than one magnificent animal.”[9]

And we all have our totems.

Some worship “just for the votes”[10]

Others “seek truth and” want to “discipline” their minds[11]

But “no matter how hard or how far chased,”

We “always in time came back to the waters of Onion Creek”[12]

We stand on what we know.

We must put our faith in what is real.

And we believe in what is known to be truth -

For it can be found.

The cowboy, were he here, would be revered

for “his refusal to conform to standards of campus behavior.”[13]

He would not lay down and chew his cud -

Rather, he would lasso the bull.

He would face the challenge.

“And the core of that something which men live on believing

Is always”[14] truth

And I will find it

While you raise your totems,

I’ll keep on searching.

“So sometimes yet, in the realities of silence and solitude,

For a few people unhampered a while by things”[15]

And while you focus on what’s visible

I’m going to look for what’s harder to see.

And I know that I shall find It.

And It too will find me.

I have to confess, it’s hard for me to sit down and read classics… if Theocritus’ writings qualify as Classics? I don’t even really know that much about what the term means, I just kind of lump anything that sounds Classical together… It just seems like there’s so much mythology and history with which you’d need to be familiar in order to really grasp the material. We spent a lot of time at my high school reading The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and all kinds of old stuff, but it was really just enough to get a taste of how much I don’t know about literature.

Anyway, that said, I needed to find out what "bucolic" means (807). When I looked it up (before realizing that it’s defined on page 459 in the anthology), m-w.com said that "bucolic" means, basically, "pastoral." I see this evidenced in the numerous mentions of nature; "water," "rock," a "lamb," "flocks," a "sloping knoll," "oak trees," "bees’-wax," "ivy-wood," "saffron fruit," and "golden flowers" are all included on page 809 alone!

I like pastoral/bucolic writing because there’s something magical, soothing, and pure about nature. A retreat to a park (or the gardens by Zilker Park J ) for an afternoon somehow seems to be able to refresh us, and give us a new focus. It feels good to plop down in a field or under a tree, saying, "Here I will sit and wait" while I’m refreshed in nature (463).

"Each year we see breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow to the ground won today" (471). Though nature is wild and uncontrollable, there also seems something so constant, so trustworthy about nature: no matter where I am living, no matter how I view myself or am viewed by others, somewhere there will almost certainly be a tree by a stream under which I can go to read. There were always be grass growing in a field somewhere – I can pretty much count on that. Though nature cannot audibly speak, its presence communicates to us a peace and a tranquility. Being in nature always gives rise to my sense of a Creator – that all this nature, all the stuff in this world, all the stuff that I’m made of got here somehow, and it’s sticking together somehow, and it’s reproducing and growing and living in this incredible symphony of life and earth and green and blood and oxygen and spirit and soul. Nature speaks to me not just because of its beauty, but because of all the ideas it brings with it.

I think that’s why pastoral literature has such a different feel than most other genres: it carries with it at once the permanence of earth, yet the temporality of the weather, the fluttering grace of butterflies, the easy rustling of the trees. Nature is at once uncertain and indisputable. It is both awesome and awe-inspiring. Pastoral literature, then, is invested with these elements.

Just as Virgil’s The Aeneid was "published… unfinished," so also is my life (819). We discussed today in class the fact that college isn’t a magical wonderland where all our problems disappear into the thin air, as our high school transcripts seemed to the first time we walked into Logic. I think most of us had expected to come to college and find ourselves, our passions, our future spouse, our new best friend, our calling, our first encounter with real and trustworthy truth. We had expected to really begin living when we got here – in a lot of ways during childhood and high school, it felt like I was in an incubator. I had to stay warm and protected for eighteen years until I was ready to hatch out into the real world. Well, I’ve reached the time that I was supposed to hatch. And now I realize that I was never inside an egg shell. Nor will I ever burst forth into life as I had expected to.

Katie said something today that really got my attention. While we were talking about the freedom that comes with the transition to college and how excited we all were to be "on our own," Katie said:

That was a pretty potent wake-up call for me. During my senior year, I made all kinds of plans and schemes to accomplish during the summer before I came to college. I accomplished very few of them. Then I came to UT. I made all kinds of crazy plans and dreams with my roommate and my new friends. I’ve accomplished very few of those. And for a long time I blamed the weird feeling I’ve had here & the struggles I’ve had transitioning on the size of UT or the fact that maybe Austin’s just not for me or…. I could go on forever making excuses for myself. The truth is, though, that I now have the freedom I’ve desired for so long. I am not "exiled from home," as Meliboeus was (822). My home is still there in Dallas. But for now, Austin can be home, too. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. I have the next 3 ½ years (I can’t say that I have four years ahead of me anymore! AAAHHHH! <Bump interjects with a firm, "Time Management!!!!">) to do what I will here on campus, and then I have the next sixty or so years to do what I will after I graduate. I have no one but myself to blame for my lack of accomplishment. I’m the only one who’s accountable for the way I spend my time. So it’s time for me to get with it.

I like the way Meliboeus treats aging and the passing of time, using phrases like "happy old man" and "hallowed springs" (823). As Katie eagerly pointed out in class today, we seem to treat all of post-undergraduate life as a slow death, seeping from the peaks of college-aged ecstasy into the smelly, decrepit, cobweb-ridden halls of senility. The ancients, though, revered the elderly, and held respect for those who had been venerated. I think we ought to hold a balanced view of age: yes, time is passing, but we’re still able to do something with it. In Ecologue IV, we’re sort of slapped in the face with time’s fleetingness: "New wars too shall arise, and once again some great Achilles to some Troy be sent. Then… the mellowing years [will] have made thee man…" (827). Hopefully this semester I’ve been made more of a woman; I would regret it if I had just stayed a child. Part of the growing process is experiencing the pain of maturing. I’ve felt that. But now I feel like it’s time to look ahead to what’s next.

" ‘Put aside the bird book,’ Amie, and your ‘analytic frame of mind, any compulsion to identify and sit still. Concentrate…" (Lopez 154). Where are you? From whence did you come? Where are you going?

I have learned that though only I am me, and no one else, I am not as unlike the rest of the world as I used to think. I now know "that organisms" think that they "move entirely on their own … until [they] settle down, as scientists do, to describe their behavior carefully" (Watts 871). Upon investigating ourselves, we realize at once our overwhelming simplicity and mind-boggling intricacy.

I’ve come from home. I’ve come from what feels safe and controllable, even though everything that is now my past was once my future. What was once wild and unknown is now tamed. I think this is why we love out pasts and tend to fear our future: the past, however frightening it might have been, cannot surprise us. It can still hurt us, but not with anything new.

I come from all the things I’ve done. My actions make up who I am. As Watts implied, I am what I do (872). Yet, these actions don’t necessarily come from my own will or intellect, for "just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own" (Watts 872). I’ve responded, I’ve acted in reflex, I’ve been inspired, I’ve done what I knew. My thoughts cause my actions, and my experiences shape my thoughts. Since "thinking is a social activity," I am continually becoming more integrated into my world and my community (Watts 872).

Like Jude, I sometimes stand outside the city, amid the wilderness, and marvel at life on the inside. But, much of the time, I am within that city. I am living.

We don’t often see children on campus. Rarely do we see anyone over twenty-five. Hardly ever do we encounter the venerable elderly. Being here gives me the sense that I am at once very young and very old, naïve and learned. College is a time warp: I met many of my best friends only three months ago, and some of my best friends in the world I haven’t seen since the beginning of summer. I’m very nearly finished with 1/8 of college – creepy! Am I older? Wiser? Have I changed? Am I growing up, or merely bumping around in "a complex wiggliness" of ideas and surroundings and experiences (Watts 872)?

Somewhere in the middle of the semester, I fell of my valiant, "Yay-for-college-and-life-and-my-whole-future-because-everything-is-great" pony. I forgot where I was going, and the fact that I am traveling. I felt as "if the place" where I was "led nowhere" (Forster 450). And since "every achievement is worthless unless it is a link in the chain of development," this was a major setback for me (Forster 451). "I was strangely disquieted" (Forster 452). I feared. I hesitated. A few people pushed me onward.

I "opened inwards" (Forster 452). Instead of fearing the horrible, I accepted it. With some grace from God, I truly think, I got stronger. I realized that the challenges I’m facing are challenges I need to experience. Right now, I am very happy. I love my friends, I really like college, and I really like my life at UT. There’s room for improvement, but isn’t that always the case here on Earth? I will not feel this way forever. But my knowledge that disappointment and sadness will one day return mustn’t overshadow my present happiness. Emotions come and go. Our determination must stick with us. I say, "Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal," and let me live, struggle, fail, win, find purpose, and learn what the goal is (Forster 452). I’m up for the challenge – we’ve got to be. Life’s too precious to forfeit. It’s too easy to give up the fight and settle back into just surviving.

"Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the … not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty" (Mill 657).

Merrell just said, "Everyone is obsessed with something!" The question is, where is our obsession taking you?