That works for me.Quote:
Originally Posted by ktd222
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That works for me.Quote:
Originally Posted by ktd222
I think we are at cross-purposes. Annie Hall is a comedy and Allen was simply making fun of Psychoanalysis and the tendency of intellectuals armed with Freud to seek the deeper meaning in the most obvious of actions. My point with regard to your comments was that you were looking at things at an almost sub-atomic level without considering fully that the larger picture might be sufficient. I didn’t think you were ‘reducing’ it – in fact, quite the opposite. ‘Reducing’ simply happened to be the word Allen humorously uses in the script. I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I thought you were being obtuse.Quote:
Originally Posted by jackyyyy
‘I am tempted to say’ was meant light-heartedly. I said ‘I am tempted’ and then said it anyway. I assumed you’d realise I was contradicting myself.
To be honest, that’s largely what I like about reading your posts – and again, I’m sorry if I offended you. Puff, The Magic Dragon was meant as a light-hearted reference to the use of psychotropic substances. For one thing, your soaring, Brownian motion-type thinking threw up the disturbing pictures that Petrarch posted above.Quote:
Originally Posted by jackyyyy
Of course he injects connotations - he's a poet - connotations and hidden meanings are his stock in trade. He is as unable to take anything at its face value as his neighbour appears to be unable not to. This is why he is asking his questions in the first place - because he can see the connotations that the other guy apparently doesn't, evinced by his falling back on the stock phrase, "Good fences...".Quote:
Originally Posted by ktd222
I don't think we're really disagreeing here, or at least, I'm not quite sure how we are. We just approached the poem from slightly different viewpoints and saw it in a slightly different light accordingly - my earlier post said it was deceptively simple; I think this shows it.
For some reason I'm see Squirrels in my monitor. :lol: :lol: :lol:
I find people on the whole are constantly in a state of 'cross-purposefullness', which I'd offer is a reason they communicate in the first place. We are being the intellectuals here, attempting to categorize. The problem is and if we perceive to have put the something in the wrong box, and I agree that when we are at a forest, looking for wood, we can stop when we see the wood. However, if we are still not sure its wood, I tend to go further into the forest. I did use the word, psychoanalyse with regard to Plath's mushrooms, so the Annie Hall reference was perfect. I never once thought you thought I was being obtuse, no worry, and I am familiar with you contradicting yourself to make a point, its an excellent tool, and my egging question was simply that - egging.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
Why are the side by side mug shots of Billy and John disturbing? They sure look related, and there is Hadrian's Wall. (Was that Brownian?)
I read your exchanges over again. You all teach me a lot. Most of all, you force me to deeply go into a thing (a poem). I have even come to like it, and reading it again, it takes a different meaning. I'm not so learned as you are and not everything you say I understand. So my viewpoint is naive, instinctive.
When reading it, I now notice the speaker's distinct playful tone that shows in truncated sentences (i.e. He is all pine and I am apple orchard)(besides, being a gardener now, I must disagree with Frost. Unless the terrain rises steeply to rocky area on the neighbor's side, pine cannot coexist with apple trees, but this is, of course possible, as the wall is made of natural stones)(sorry for the divagation). I now think, the speaker implicitely agrees with the neighbor's proposition. He just tempts him a bit, and himself. Proof: he himself demands for the rebuilding of the wall. But 'Spring is the mischief in me' and what better time to go against all that presses against us in daily life all year round. Let's try break down order a bit. I don't think of him as the liberal intellectual and the other one as a stubborn farmer. (What's a farmer doing on a stony hill?) He's just another homeowner whose mood is not for playing games. Then, meeeting incomprehension, the speaker is overcome by a strong dislike of the man (old-stone savage armed), he sees someone horrible towering above him out of some darkness (who knows: his own?)
And there he mentions the neighbor's father (maybe all fathers, or his own??) and the submissive son who's so content of being obedient, although he had 'thought of it so well' which means: he had to reason as well and is not some dumb guy. And so he has the last word, with which the speaker agreed all along.
I should probably let all this sit a while and then read it again, but I won't.
Frost lived in New Hampshire, which is a rocky, mountainous area. For your info. Now that I think of it, the farmer is your typical New England Yankee, short of words, full of proverbs, and hard working, stubborn fellow.Quote:
Originally Posted by MelanieD
Such familairity. :lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by jackyyyy
Mary Wilkie: I guess I should straighten my life out, huh? I mean, Donnie my analyst is always telling me...
Isaac Davis: You call your analyst Donnie?….. I call mine Dr. Chomsky
Annie Hall
I missed that. So, the neighbour is not a farmer, has 'only' pine cones and some rocks, and the speaker is the one with the apples. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by MelanieD
Good point, it didn't even occur to me. I am obtuse!Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
And well, Mary is getting her analysis done for free (more or less). :brow:
Sorry Xamonas, this reminds me of "Morning Song", where the author is speaking for the speaker, kind of. Yes, I know what you mean when you write the poet is injecting connotations, but, finally its the speaker who does the connotating, isn't it. I am reading this wrong?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
You could try adjusting the horizontal.Quote:
Originally Posted by ktd222
Do you mean... those squirrels again?
:smash: <------- wack-a-mole
Perhaps - but I see a difference in the two poems on this point. In Morning Song, the poem begins, "He speaks", telling us (as if the sex difference wasn't enough :D) that the poet and the speaker are not one and the same. In the Frost poem, the writing style is in the style of a personal anecdote or recollection - the reader is meant to accept that the speaker is the poet himself and not some creation. This may not be the case - the incident could be purely fictitious and/or exagerrated - but that is not my impression.Quote:
Originally Posted by jackyyyy
Its Monday here.
I owe this poem, among several other things, to a friend.
More Light! More Light!
For Heinrich Blucher and Hannah Arendt
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
"I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime."
Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.
And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul's tranquility.
We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Luger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.
Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.
No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Luger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.
No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
-Anthony Hecht
There are times when you read something that leaves you feeling that there is nothing left to be said, nothing that can be said but that you have to say it anyway. This poem is one of those things.
I find it extremely powerful and unanswerable. I can’t think of many lines that are more horrible than that description of the burning martyr:
“His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.”
And yet this physical horror is ‘surpassed’ by the psychological horror of what follows.
For those who don’t know, Hannah Arendt was a German philosopher/political theorist who fled to the USA in 1941 to escape the Nazis. She was married to Heinrich Blucher.
She studied Philosophy with Martin Heidegger and they were lovers for a while – interesting given Heidegger’s later membership of the Nazi Party.
She is possibly most famous for her phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Adolf Eichmann (she covered the Eichmann Trial).
The title of the poem comes from what were (supposedly) Goethe’s dying words.