Happy Valentine's Day!

That's right, it's time once again for the holiday that makes everyone miserable. So why am I in such a good mood? Not telling. :)

Today the idea is to write for as long as I can manage it. Where do I begin, though? Do I start where I left off with one of my other rants? Do I brainstorm about the use of ineffective magic in We Have Always Lived in the Castle? Do I discuss the embracing of Bokononism in Cat's Cradle? Do I delve into the superimposition of the Gradus narrative on the final days of Shade's life in Pale Fire? Do I piece together what I have from my notes amid the quotes I pulled from various books? Do I read some theory? I don't know. Which is why I started here, I suppose.

Going back to the substance of my questions, I've been thinking about this, and I don't want to discuss religious elements of two of the three, specifically because there aren't any religious elements in - no, that's the wrong way to word it: there are spiritual elements in PF, there is contemplation of the afterlife, there is a haunting. But there isn't necessarily a system of belief. Okay, maybe there is, on the part of the poem at the very least, but I don't want to talk about religion the whole time. I'm not interested in the religious aspects in and of themselves, but how they are indicative of a way of thinking about the past, a way of organizing that past, a way of ordering, simplifying, reducing. But I also want to talk about Merricat's representation of the past as limited or unlimited, as interrupted by these catastrophic events, as marked by regularly scheduled stressful encounters like going into the village or outsiders coming to tea. But then am I talking about too many things? I just need to write.

When I started what I called my close reading of We Have Always..., I started going through the text line by line, writing down every instance of "always," "never," and any other marker of temporality. I have nine pages of notes for 37 pages of text. To continue in this vein seems to me to be rather time consuming. And, really, what am I getting at there? I don't need to document every instance of temporal confusion in the novel, I don't have space for that kind of discussion in my thesis, even if this was the only novel I was writing about.

Incidentally, I had the weirdest dream this morning. It was very confused, a ridiculous amount of different interactions and scenarios happening all at once, I was being turned in a million different directions, and every time I thought I had resolved something - found what or who I was looking for, diffused a confrontation of some kind - something completely different presented itself. My adviser was there, and I think she was waiting on our table or something, and we (I don't remember who the female friend was, but there was a male friend as well, and my parents may have been there too, I don't really remember) were at a sort of biergarten type place, with strangers across from us at these picnic table looking things, and there was like a flight of beers, but they were all imperial pints, and my adviser pulled our tray before we were done, so the female friend to my left got mad and said, well, I'm just going to take the next peoples order, because she had been trying to order something and my adviser had ignored her, like she was trying to rush us out of there, turn and burn style, but what the next people had ordered were like strawberry milkshakes. It was very weird. Convoluted. I was also studying with a friend at one point, trying to find a bar open long enough to use their bathroom, and it was all sort of in a mall-type complex. Who knows. I may have a lot on my plate.

Back to my thesis: I need to keep reminding myself of my focus, which is the ordering of the past, the patterning of the past, around catastrophic events in such a way that super-imposes teleology. My point, of course, is that causality is something that can only be imposed after the fact - events as they have already happened only have a known result because the result has already happened. Is that tautological? Perhaps it is the way that I've just worded it. I think I know what I'm trying to say, but I haven't gotten to the point where I'm effectively saying it. And the only way to do that is to put it in writing. Let's do this.